Ekros

Well, im a fairly good Python programmer but im not sure if Python should be primarily used to make applications, or for learning a language to help you getting acustomed to other languages?

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Arevos

It depends what applications you wish to make. Python works well on the server side, running web applications like Plone or Trac. It also doesn't do badly with GUI applications, such as Bittorrent.

You won't be able to develop the next Google, Quake or Microsoft Office in Python, but the language is suited for rapid development of small to medium sized applications.

Infinite Recursion

Python is used a great deal in Linux applications, not so much in Windows (it seems). I'm a fan of Perl myself, though I toyed with the idea of learning more advanced Python because it is relatively new.

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Cerulean

I hear its getting more exposure on the Mac side too, as it's shipped with recent versions of Mac OS X. With that said, its userbase is always rapidly increasing on all different operating systems. When an application is made with Python on Windows you just won't know it as easily as it'll be bundled up with py2exe or something of the sort.

I'd go as far as saying it does excellently with GUI applications. Python's dynamic nature and duck typing makes many high level constructs of particular use in GUI building (signals/slots) childs play. Python takes out the hefty compile step, removes the worry about build management with makefiles to get things to build properly, and - provided the toolkit is also - is platform agnostic. Being interpreted isn't a real issue with GUI applications as the GUI libraries are usually written in C or C++, and the applications tend to be input bound. If there are bits where performace is critical, they can easily be written in Pyrex or C.

Weeell i'm not so sure I agree with you on that. Google is a very heavy user of Python as you're probably aware - If you look around pages on Google you'll even see a few of them have a .py extension. I can understand that very intense performance (millions of hits per second) would probably require use of a compiled language, but in Google's case it also requires use of a custom web server, so you know.
As for developing the next Quake - i've found developing 3D games with Panda3D to be very enjoyable and manageable, and that the games themselves run very quickly indeed, so why not? EVE online makes heavy use of Python, for example.
Microsoft Office uses its own hybrid GUI toolkit of some description, so you probably wouldn't be able to develop the next MS Office with C or C++ anyways :-P. Don't see why an office application would be so unfeasible with Python personally.

To answer the original question, Python is definitely not a language that is solely there to help you step onto other things. It's the primary language that I write applications in, be they games, GUI applications, network clients/servers, whatever. Sure, I agree with using the right tool for the right job, but many of the times Python is just that. Being an easy language doesn't mean that it's a toy one, it just means it's a well designed one.

Arevos

Of course. I wasn't saying that Python couldn't be used in conjunction with compiled language such as C or C++, just that Python alone doesn't have the efficiency required for such heavy work.
I hadn't run across Panda3D before - I'm certainly going to have a nose around that site later on. But whilst EVE and Panda3D make use of Python for higher level logic, they use a compiled language for the computing intensive 3D engine. And this was rather my point again - that whilst Python is an excellent language, in the case of large projects, it needs to be supported by lower-level libraries and frameworks.

Dietrich

There is a certain symbiosis between C, C++ and Python that makes it very worth while to know all three languages well. I would start with Python for the fun of it, then bring in C and C++.

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Ekros

Nice posts everyone. Alot of you have answered questions that were in my moving around my head. Im gonna try to make Python my primary language and then I will try to move on to C++ in the future.

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Writlaus

Python was the first language I've learned; I am now familiar with it, PHP, Java, and a bit of C++ and Javascript. I've found it to be an excellent language to be your first--but I'm not saying that that's all it's good for.

I agree that it is good for smaller programs, or working in conjunction with other languages. Additionally, it's always nice to know if you want to write a short script that, for example, just parses a bit of text. Just a bit ago, I wrote a short piece of code that made an email I got more readable.


Didn't even need to use anything other than the prompt in python to do that--I love it for doing simple tasks like that.

The way I've looked at python is: It makes writing the program very fast, but running the program can sometimes be way slower than other languages could make it. As such, it's good for simple programs.

Dietrich

The speed of developing a program (any size) is often more critical than the speed of execution. Python has many other languages beat in this category!

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hydroxide

<cough>It worked for the last Google<cough cough>

-T.