Python is like a Secret Weapon

I am continually in awe of the power of Python code. The readability of the language combined with the lack of magic, and the massive number of easily obtainable libraries out there make getting things done insanely fast. It is the only language where I consistently experience writing code that works the first time.

Last night I added a geo-location aware link redirector with click tracking to my django web app. It took about 1 hour to code while I was listening to a panel discussion. Within that hour I had written, tested, added additional models, migrated the production database and deployed the new application.

At my day job, we have decided to migrate our web app from grails to django. The benefits have been numerous. The Groovy to Python conversion has resulted in significantly less lines of code, unit test runtime has dropped from 15 minutes to 3 seconds. The delay in starting the dev server dropped from 10 seconds to instantaneous. The functional style of code makes it far easier to avoid copy/pasting logic between subclasses. Python’s flexible import statement allows us to structure the code so that it makes more sense.

If you’re not using Python. You should be.