why python?

On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Brian Candler wrote:

>
> P.S. I suppose I should add that personally I don't like the fact that ASK
> and TMDA are written in Python, just because it's more software to install
> on a mail system. C would be my preference, for both portability and speed.
>

I don't want to start an off-topic language discussion here, so I'll
to stick to my (opposite) experience here. Sure I found at first a bit
painful to upgrade to a recent version of python on one of my
machines. But then, when I had to correct some... "features" that did
not fit my taste in version 2.5.0, I was more than happy to discover
that I could so easily and so quickly read, understand and make short
modifications to the code.

Sure I do not need to manage hundreds of mailboxes. It all depends in
which "speed" you are interested in I guess. If ASK was written in C,
it might not be... completed at this time :-)

Moreover, depending on what you are doing, a low-level language like C
is not always the fastest:
<http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/index2.shtml>

PS: I have several several years experience in C, including some linux
and solaris driver programming, and working on a compiler generating C
code. I have near-zero experience in python.



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