On Mon, 2009-06-15 at 09:16 +0200, Peter Hopfgartner wrote: > Python has become quite common for sysadmin stuff. Indeed, a lot of > RedHat/Fedora (e.g. anaconda, the installer) and Ubuntu tools are really > Python scripts. The code is quite readable and usually, there are Python > bindings for almost every popular C library. Python will let you develop programs very quickly, the first time. The problem is that you'll have to go back and redo the code when a different version of python is released. There are major incompatibilities between 2.5 and 3.0. If you have a lot of code and/or use the low level C bindings, it can be a major effort to make your code run under a new release. Take a look at the poor folks at zope.org. They've been beaten half to death with almost every release. Also, there are several engineers at Red Hat that are very unhappy with the impact that the 3.0 release is going to have on them. > GUI can quickly be made with PyGTK or WxPython. And, of course, there's glade to help. The bottom line is that you can probably get your project done faster in python. But if you have a lot of code that you're going to need to maintain, you're much better off with java, which actually has a lot of input from the user community, and respects their user base. Dave