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March 1, 2003

The Major Leagues

Python, once a relatively obscure open-source language, may be just what your organization needs

by Michael J. Hudson

Let's play a little game of deduction. I'll give you a description of a certain high-level, object-oriented programming language, and you tell me what it is. It's been around since the early 1990s and is free to use and currently in hundreds of open-source applications. Platform independence is one of its big hallmarks. Improved readability and reuse are natural benefits of the language. It's sometimes seen as a major improvement on an older language that was used as its basis. An exhaustive standard library is included that covers everything from I/O to data structures. A number of extension libraries are also available for strategic business applications such as Web development, database interactions, CORBA, GUIs, and even Web services. And last, organizations such as BEA Systems Inc., IBM, Google Technology Inc., Yahoo Inc., Disney, Red Hat Inc., and even Industrial Light & Magic all use it.

Now after all those clues, your answer is probably the Java language. Wrong. The answer is Python.

The Origins of Python

For all of you unfamiliar with Python, get ready for the "next big thing." But despite what this phrase implies, Python isn't a newcomer to the scene. It's actually been around slightly longer than Java, and as I mentioned previously, used by a multitude of big businesses. Think of it as the best language you've probably never heard of. In fact, for the longest time, it was looked upon as nothing more than a simple scripting language — hardly expected to mix company with big players such as C++, Visual Basic, and Java. This perception is perhaps due to Python's humble beginnings as a successor to a teaching language.

Guido van Rossum created Python as an improvement to the ABC language. He geared this new language, however, toward experienced programmers. He also used Smalltalk, C, Lisp, and quite a lot of Modula-3 as the basis for this new language. In the end, what could have turned out to be mishmash has recently become somewhat of a staple to well-rounded developers.

Python Benefits

This somewhat irreverent language (named after the British comedy troupe Monty Python) has a quicker development time than most other languages: Python code is a lot shorter in length than its counterparts, which lets developers get more done in less time. In the same vein, its syntax is very similar to other languages, reducing the time developers need to learn it.

Python is one of the few languages that enforce white space, thus massively increasing readability. More often than not, a piece of unfamiliar Python code is a lot easier to understand than a similar piece of Java code. One of the main reasons for this benefit is that Python innately discourages overly esoteric or exotic coding practices. In other words, Python usually has only one or two real ways of coding something, which lets someone outside of your project quickly understand what's being done and immediately help improve or maintain the code.

All these advantages help reduce the amount of syntactical errors. Moreover, because Python is an interpreted language, you can test the execution of the code while developing without spending prodigious amounts of time compiling and deploying it first. This advantage reduces the amount of time spent debugging the application. Although I haven't seen any conclusive studies, a commonly held belief among advocates is that Python development is at least 10 times faster than C or C++.