Python has been around for a dozen years and is going strong — two production releases a year, a vibrant community, lively Net presence, yearly conferences, tracks on Python at Open Source and Web Development venues, books, articles, the works. Why is Python so popular? The reasons are simplicity, regularity, and the talent of Guido van Rossum, Python’s inventor and Benevolent Dictator For Life. Hundreds of people contribute to Python, but Guido has the final say; his hand at the helm makes Python a well-architected whole, not a soup of “features” (For more on Guido, see our interview with him in the December 2001 issue, available online at http://www.linux-mag/2001-12/vanRossum_01.html.). There are no “convenient” shortcuts, quirks, or special cases: just power through simplicity, clean syntax, and generality.
Python is simple inside, too; its highly modular, structured internals and clean, well-documented API makes it easy to port, extend, embed in applications, and interface with existing libraries. Jython, the 100 percent pure Java implementation of Python, lets you deploy Python wherever you can use Java, with full access to Java’s class libraries.
Python can also be found embedded in applications such as the cooledit editor and the Blender 3D modeler and is at the heart of the Zope Web application server. And Python has lots of extensions to let you handle diverse tasks, including numerical applications, image processing, distributed computing, multimedia, and games.
If you’re just beginning to learn how to…
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