Python

Tonight decided to take a look at Python. I know a bit of Perl and did create a couple of scripts in this "language". More formal and stricter languages like Java, C# and Visual Basic seem easier to learn, but compared to Python generate a whole lot more code.

I was pleasantly surprised by the offered modules from Python and how little code it takes to accomplish something. The documentation is quite up to speed and it offers some quite ingenious unit testing capabilities. You just wrap it into the docs. It then becomes a test case plus an example for somebody else to use.

Now, I find Python slightly easier to use in comparison to Perl. It's slightly less cryptic and uses more the concept of "function" than "operator". I was very pleasantly surprised to see it has support for SMTP, WWW, XML, UNIX, threads, concurrency, data types, (easy) iterators, functions, modularization, serialization, profiling, C module extensions, classes, embedding and so on. It's in a way sort of comparable with certain features of Java.

My advice: Give the tutorial a spin once... You'll get to know the capabilities and the rest from there is just reference work!

http://www.python.org/doc/