"You will find as your programming experience increases that the different languages you learn are appropriate for different purposes, and have different advantages and disadvantages. Python excels at expressing algorithms in an unambiguous and easily-readable way." - Steve Holden, Mar. 17, 2006

"Also Python code is pretty bare-metal, so that file.write or socket.write go to the syscall immediately. Try that in Java and you'll find 30 layers of complex abstractions for doubtful benefits and obvious slowness." -- Giovanni Bajo, Feb. 6, 2006

"Python makes it easy to implement algorithms." - casevh, Dec. 2, 2005

"In my view, the doctrinaire', indeed religious, adherence to OO purity has harmed our discipline considerably. Python was a nice breath of fresh air when I discovered it exactly because it does not have this slavish committment to an exclusively OO model." -- Tim Daneliuk, Sep. 13, 2005

"If I wanted to write five lines instead of one everywhere in a Python program, I'd use Java." -- Paul Rubin, Aug. 30, 2005

"It seems to me that Java is designed to make it difficult for programmers to write bad code, while Python is designed to make it easy to write good code." -- Magnus Lycka, Aug. 18, 2005

"The posts do share an erroneous, implied assumption that the investment in learning each language is equal. Python has a strong competitive advantage over Java and C++ in terms of learnability. A person can get up to speed in a few days with Python." - Raymond Hettinger, Jul. 13, 2005

"As you learn Python, you will find that your PHP code will improve, possibly becoming more and more concise until it disappears completely." - Jorey Bump, May 16, 2005

"Python's flavor of OO is perfectly valid and usable, even though it doesn't follow the Java Holy Bible of Object Orientation (gasp!)" - Hans Nowak, May 9, 2005

"It's highly arguable if Python is "better" than C#, but from a control-your-own-destiny angle, Python is a complete slam dunk. Python works well on *nix, Java, .NET and Mac OS X. It's open source. It's
sane. But I won't argue it's fast. It's usually just not so slow you care." - Jonathan Rentzsch, May 9, 2005

"Working with unicode objects in Python is so transparent, it's easy to forget about what a C extension would likely want." -- Kevin Dangoor

"You can't live without unit tests. And once you have unit tests, the added value of declarations is tiny, and their cost remains." -- martellibot, Feb. 15, 2005

"C++ to Python is a steep 'unlearning' curve..." -- Philip Smith, Feb. 9, 2005

"Python, the language that wraps tightly around a problem and swallows it whole." -- Raymond Hettinger, Dec. 25, 2004

"Python makes me very lazy. Writing a report in LaTeX today, it was actually easier for me to make up a syntax for tagging math symbols (put into comments in the LaTeX source), and extract those and build a List Of Symbols with a python preprocessor before texification, rather than find (and figure out how to use) the correct LaTeX package for that." - Caleb Hattingh, Oct. 18. 2004

"...then we get a signal through, then various miracles occur, and the conclusion is, 'You mean it only takes thirteen lines of code to do that? Our software folks said it's not possible.' Cameron Laird, on his typical experience with industrial automation projects, Oct. 4, 2004

"[U]se the best tool for the job, and don't use any that preclude you from using others at the same time as well." Roger Binns, Sep. 14, 2004

When you are switching from, say, Java you will probably be surprised that in Python p = 2**24036583 - 1 is all it takes to calculate the largest known prime number to date. Peter Otten, Jun. 14, 2004

"What is so nice about Python is that there are so many places on the user/scripter/programmer/computer-scientist spectrum where you can be and find Python to be a useful tool. This makes it very easy to
build good collaborations between domain experts and 'real programmers' where both sides can use the same language and neither feels constrained or overwhelmed." - Roy Smith, Apr. 5, 2004

"Well, to do what I've done so far in Java would have taken at least 5 and probably more like 10 times the code I've written. A simple yet decent TCP chat server in about 30 lines of code is something I never
considered possible before looking at Python." -- Qp, Mar. 19, 2004

"So far, python has been the easiest language to learn I've ever come across. I tried learning perl, and it
was a disaster.... Too convoluted. Python is a breath of fresh air. Also, the docs and support here is excellent. :-) My thanks to all the volunteers who put in time to build python." -- Kamus of Kadizhar Dec. 15, 2003

"Oddly enough it is in Python that I have had the most fun programming. It is in Python that I find myself not only the most expressive but the most elegant in my programming. In Python my code is the clearest and most concise. I don't for one instant feel constrained by Python. I feel liberated by it." -- Steve Lamb, Nov.24, 2003

"After a few hours with Python, I was already better at object-oriented Python than I ever was at object-oriented Perl." -- Tuang, Nov.24, 2003

"Python seems to encourage and reward incremental effort, and it leads one to explore extensions and improvements to programs because the language makes it relatively easy to see how to do the extensions." -- Ron Stephens, Sep. 22, 2003

"I think it's a real and fairly unique selling point for Python that it's both easy to use and suitable for very varying and advanced applications." -- Magnus Lycka, Sep. 8, 2003

"Perl, Python, Ruby and Tcl are the four dynamic programming languages that get the most publicity as open source projects, and I think they have a lot more in common than they differ." -- Guido van Rossum, Aug. 25, 2003

"What can I do with Python that I can't do with C#? You can go home on time at the end of the day." -- Daniel Klein, Aug. 12, 2003

"Python lends itself to playing with it and to discussing the merits of code snippets with other people. It's one of the 'language' languages, in that it's suitable for people to communicate using it, and it can even be used as [a] tool to check ones thoughts." -- Anton Vredegoor, Aug. 12, 2003

"OOP can save you from debugging software to the same extent that COBOL can remove the need for programmers." -- Mark Carter, May 20, 2003

"[B]y choosing a lower level language, like C++, at the start of your project, rather than a higher level one, like Python, you ARE optimizing WAY prematurely." Alex Martelli, Mar. 31, 2003

"We will perhaps eventually be writing only small modules which are identified by name as they are used to build larger ones, so that devices like indentation, rather than delimiters, might become feasible for
expressing local structure in the source language." --Donald E. Knuth "Structured Programming with goto Statements", Computing Surveys, Vol 6 No 4, Dec. 1974, Mar. 17, 2003

"[I tried python] And my problems dissapeared! It was like hosing ice with hot water" Max M Rasmussen, Mar. 3, 2003

"I never quite understood why people despise Perl so much until I've had to wade through the current code to rewrite it in Python. It's so much better in Python." Robert Kern, Feb. 24, 2003

"The problem is that, now that I know Python, I have lost any motivation to learn C++ anymore ..." - Michele Simionato, Feb. 17, 2003

"I'd say that Python's greatest strength is that it took me about two months to become as competent at Python as I was after two years of C++." Mark Charsley, Feb. 3, 2003