Friday, January 07, 2005

Re: Advice for Computer Science College Students

Lots of blogs queued up in my head!!

Great! They're much needed. This place is becoming pretty lonely again.

What is the size of a python project after which it becomes unfeasable? And will co's adopt it? The advantage of faster development will sort of
be reduced by a need for better testing.


That's the thing. Generally, these scripting languages are not suited for large apps because they quickly become unmanagable. But people don't seem to have a problem with Python for huge apps. It has a huge library framework a la Java/.NET. It doesn't seem as well organized or documented, but it's there. Plus Python is Open Source so there is a huge community behind it with a lot of external libraries.

Tcl can be accompanied by other tools - OTcl and Tclcl. OTcl provides Object-Oriented functionality to Tcl. Tclcl helps in linkage between OTcl
code and C++ code. Does Python support OOPs, and/or C++ linkage?


Python is an OO language. It's not strict like Java... more like C++ in that you can have functions and data NOT associated with a class. Plus, apparently it has a close relation with C/C++. So if there is some functionality that is not available you can create it with C/C++ and "expose" it in Python. As you can imagine this is a pretty advanced topic - I just scanned through the page. Anyway, this is a pretty huge feature considering they have the OS community to keep adding features.

Another possibility is that co's develop in Python but convert the code to compiled before being deployed. (I have made dumber suggetions before!!)

Nope not dumb at all. You're talking about prototyping. At one time VB used to be popular for that. It was so easy to cook something up (RAD) and do some initial testing. Once it was accepted, convert it to a C++ app and ship it. But it seems a lot guys just stick with Python all the way through.

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