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Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 10:39:28 -0600
From: Tim Chase <python.list@tim.thechases.com>
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Subject: Re: How to "wow" someone new to Python
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:83892

On 2015-01-17 02:03, Chris Angelico wrote:
> Ideally, this should be something that can be demo'd quickly and
> easily, and it should be impressive without going into great details
> of "and see, this is how it works on the inside". So, how would you
> brag about this language?

First, I agree with Andrew Berg's suggestion about the breadth of the
stdlib.  This always irks me when I have to return to the C/C++
world where there's no standard library for things like networking
(and thus no stock libraries for IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, FTP, etc or
email-message handling), CSV processing, regular expressions,
zip/tar/zlib files, SHA1/MD5, command-line option processing,
threading, and no available-everywhere GUI.  In the Java world, it
feels like much of this is available, but that the glommed-on
standards have multiple ways to do them (the old way(s) and the
new/improved way).  In PHP, well...that's just PHP (difficult-to-grok
equality testing, inconsistent naming conventions and parameter
ordering, lack of namespacing, easy-to-screw-up string interpolation,
hacky OOP, etc).

My fast-introduction go-to items are dir() and help() within the REPL
interface.  Nothing speeds up my development like being able to
drop to a PDB prompt and inspect an object, ask what properties it
supports, dump them, get help on them, etc.

There's also the bigint stuff that means I don't have to worry about
over/underflow errors.

I'm sure there are more great ideas, but how you market might depend
on your audience's background in programming (what language did they
use and what pain-points did they experience).

-tkc