Why learn python?

[Burgresso]

why should I learn python? what can you do with it?

I've been reading about it at wikipedia to learn about it, but I'm trying to figure what makes it special or unique. I know it can be part of the LAMP stack, but is it hard to develop web apps with it?

I program php and asp and was considering learning it as a hobby, but was just curious to learn if it would really be worth it and/or if learning it would pay off in the ability to create cool programs, primarily for the web-based applications.

gracias,

burgresso

[tribaal]

Well you can use python for a bunch of things, including some stand-alone apps (i.e. not web based).

It's very elegant and powerful, reliable and fast. That's all there is to it ;)

- trib'

[kripkenstein]

The Python site (http://www.python.org) has some brief explanations about what Python is and why it is good. It's a nice site and a good place to start.

Personally, I would say 'go for it!'. Python is easy to learn, fun, and you can do anything with it - websites, standalone software, scripting, you name it. Python syntax is short and clear, so writing programs is faster and easier than other languages. As you can see, I like it... :)

[visik7]

fast to learn powerfull and quoting a friends of mine
"the whole world can be summerize in 2 lines of python" :)

[Burgresso]

I think you've all convinced me :)

Can anyone think of large websites that run python off the top of their heads?

Thanks again

burgresso

[ketsugi]

Oh, that one's easy. Blogger.com has been running on Python since it first opened (pre-Google). I'm not sure if it still uses Python after the Google buyover, but I think it does.

Python's not as common as PHP but having played with it a bit I think it's much better. It's far more OO than PHP will ever be, methinks.

[ifokkema]

Hate to be the only one not as enthousiastic, but for web-based apps, PHP is much better IMHO. We have a student here who was told to do a project in Python. It was a mess for us to install mod_python for him (but that could be us) but after that he's running into lots of problems with web related functionality that's easy to do in PHP. He just can't seem to find ways of doing things in Python, that can be easily found in the PHP manual. Just my two cents.