The continual rise of Python
A couple of weekends ago, prompted by a presentation from one of the team at work, I attempted to learn Python and write my first app in Google AppEngine. It was a wonderful experience, fuelled, I think, by three things:
- Django, on which with the AppEngine is based, is a very simple, intuitive web application framework;
- The Google AppEngine development kit simplifies it even further — I didn’t even need to configure the database which, frankly, is how it should be.
- Python is a pretty clear language, and doesn’t have any of the syntactic pretentiousness of , say, Ruby and its vertical bars.
Now I see that Sun is taking it up more seriously, incorporating it into their NetBeans IDE. If you’re a bit techy and want a day’s fun then you could do worse than downloading the AppEngine and going through the informative and straightforward tutorial.
