September 12, 2005 (Computerworld) --
It's known as a programmer's programming language. And after years of fine-tuning, the open-source Python is graduating from being the darling of a select group of developers to being the brains behind some mainstream applications.
Guido van Rossum, principal architect of the language and founder of the nonprofit Python Software Foundation, developed the earliest version of the Python language about 15 years ago with help from two partners -- Jack Jansen and Sjoerd Mullender -- largely as a hobby. His goal was to create a highly portable, object-oriented language that was less complex than Java or C++ and could be manipulated by developers in a toolbox-like environment.
"It really is a programming language that tries hard to make the programmer happy," says van Rossum. "Whether a small application or large application, its users are continually wowed at how quickly they get results and do prototypes and show demonstrations, and how soon the prototype can be actually used in an application."
Although Python isn't generally well known, it boasts about a half-million users in the open-source community. Recently, the language has gained a foothold in the enterprise and has been embraced by organizations like Google Inc., NASA and special effects company Industrial Light & Magic. San Mateo, Calif.-based Elemental Security Inc., which sells software that helps companies comply with security policies, is using Python because it has an embedded capability to quickly add new or customized policies and deploy them enterprisewide on the fly, says van Rossum.
The beauty of Python is that a developer in virtually any industry can use it to very quickly bring up an application with a Web server and an open-source database without requiring the same amount of money as a lengthy project, says Michael Goulde, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. Simple development is its strong suite, however. Python isn't a good fit for for heavy-duty functions such as online transactional processing.
What sets Python apart from Perl and other dynamic languages is its ease of maintenance. Python is an especially clean language in terms of readability and is very modular, like Java and C#. In general, modular languages are considered easier to maintain because they clearly separate code into its constituent parts, says Richard Monson-Haefel, an analyst at Burton Group Inc. in Midvale, Utah. Python may usurp Java and C++ in terms of popularity, he says.
"I'm completely confident that the successor to Java and C/C++/C# will be a dynamic language such as Python or Ruby. Python has a larger ecosystem today than Ruby, so it would seem to have a very good chance at becoming the successor. It's not a stretch to say that the successor to Java and C/C++/C# will be a dynamic language, and that dynamic language could be Python," Monson-Haefel says. He notes that it has all the strengths of an excellent development language in that it's modular, mature, well supported and secure. It's also currently being adapted to both the Java and .Net platforms.
But despite ongoing improvements, van Rossum acknowledges that not all of Python's bugs have been worked out. Version 2.5 is expected in early 2006, and among the planned updates are tools that automate cleanup and correction of code.
Although still in the planning stages, a radically new version, Python 3.0, will unify user and systems classes, says van Rossum. "It's going to be the one release where we allow ourselves to break backward compatibility; this is sometimes necessary in order to fix early design mistakes."
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