What Is Python?

It's still a defining image. In May 2000, Linux Journal did a special supplement on the Python language, and the editors wanted to do something fun for the cover. There wasn't the budget for the Knights Who Say "Ni," the Minister of Silly Walks was unavailable, and perhaps they couldn't find a cross-dressing lumberjack for a photo shoot. Yet they needed something Pythonesque to get the right mood. Someone remembered a sketch with an organist in the middle of a field near the ocean, and a legend was born. The supplement featured a long side-shot of a man sitting at a (computer) keyboard with his bowtie on and nothing else. And the letters poured in. Take a look at http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4106.

There may have been some folks who didn't get it (indeed there will always be some folks who don't get it), but one thing that Python (the language) and the people who use it aim to do is dispel the myth of the humorless geek. The language is named, after all, for the immortal stars of the British sketch show "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Yet for all the silliness inherent in Python culture, the language is responsible for some very hardworking tools.

Quality assurance teams for both computer hardware and software use Python scripts to get their products ready for release. Search engines (including Google) use Python to perform their tasks. Web designers and bloggers use Python-based tools Zope and Plone to generate their content. Top-flight scientists in geophysics, electromagnetics, and fluid dynamics use the SciPy library in their research.

Python programmers are very productive because the language is easy to grasp, and it doesn't take much to get going. It puts an emphasis on creating human-readable code and being explicit about what is going on in the code. The language handles many housekeeping activities, such as I/O, memory management, data typing, and variable binding, with aplomb.

The next section tells you a little bit about programming in Python and the tools available to you in SUSE Linux.