Now I suspect that some of what I am (and you are?) attributing to python is actually the result of embracing a test-driven approach to development, but it’s still remarkable how easy it is to transmogrify quite large bits of python code months or even years after it was written.

And I’m sure you’re right that appearance is connected somehow too. Python’s clean appearance somehow encourages clean code…and clean code is easier to understand, and often actually better, so easier to modify.

A virtuous spiral indeed.

It is interesting that one of the arguments for the performance of Microsoft’s .Net is that developer productivity it more important than software performance, because it is cheaper to buy more hardware than it is to pay developers - but this isn’t an argument I particularly like, it just seems, I don’t know, lazy?

Given that this is what Microsoft claims, it is telling that I managed to re-write one of my apps from C#, into Python with a 70% reduction in LOC and and less than half the time. Some of this I put down to familiarity with the problem domain, and I don’t doubt being new to Python it took me longer to write than it should have.

End result, after 6 years with .Net (and plenty of Java time before that) my first port of call is now nearly always Python and not .Net. I am after all just taking Microsoft’s advice :)

Anyway, thanks!

“When you program, you spend more time reading code than writing it. You push blobs of source code around the way a sculptor does blobs of clay. So a language that makes source code ugly is maddening to an exacting programmer, as clay full of lumps would be to a sculptor.”

The Python Paradox - Paul Graham, August 2004
http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html