Masterminds of Programming

Chapter 2. Python

Python is a modern, general-purpose, high-level language developed by Guido van Rossum as a result of his work with the ABC programming language. Python’s philosophy is pragmatic; its users often speak of the Zen of Python, strongly preferring a single obvious way to accomplish any task. Ports exist for VMs such as Microsoft’s CLR and the JVM, but the primary implementation is CPython, still developed by van Rossum and other volunteers, who just released Python 3.0, a backward-incompatible rethinking of parts of the language and its core libraries.

The Pythonic Way

What differences are there between developing a programming language and developing a “common” software project?

Guido van Rossum: More than with most software projects, your most important users are programmers themselves. This gives a language project a high level of “meta” content. In the dependency tree of software projects, programming languages are pretty much at the bottom—everything else depends on one or more languages. This also makes it hard to change a language—an incompatible change affects so many dependents that it’s usually just not feasible. In other words, all mistakes, once released, are cast in stone. The ultimate example of this is probably C++, which is burdened with compatibility requirements that effectively require code written maybe 20 years ago to be still valid.

How do you debug a language?

Guido: You don’t. Language design is one area where agile development methodologies ...