This is the right month to add this post in my blog…. Have you ever seen the month September of 1752 ?…. You may say that… ‘what a silly question this man is asking?’ and if you ask me the question…‘what so special about the month September of 1752…?’ My answer would be … Yes it is a special month of year 1752. If you look into the calendar of the year 1752 and concentrate on the month September, you find that some days are missing in that month.

I got these strange phenomena, while reading the complete manual of ‘date’ command in Linux… If you are working in Unix, please try this out. At $ prompt, type: cal 9 1752 – Surprised???? Why the year 1752 is like this …? A month with whole of eleven days missing. This was the time England shifted from Roman Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar, and the king of England ordered those 11 days to be wiped off the face of the month of September of 1752. (What couldn’t a King do in those days?!) And yes, the workers worked for 11 days less, but got paid for the entire 30 days. And that’s how “Paid Leave” was born. Hail the King!!!

Before that April is the first Month of the year. Even then people didn’t agree to use the Roman Julian Calendar and celebrated 1st April as a New Year then the King announced that, those who celebrate April as the New Year are fools… (thats why it is April fools day)

Interesting fact isn’t it?

I was reading a management case study yesterday. The basic principle of the case is KISS (Keep It Simple and Stupid). The case goes like this way

1. When NASA began launching astronauts into Space, they found out that the astronauts’ pens wouldn’t work at zero gravity (ink wouldn’t flow down to the writing surface). It took them one decade and $12 million to solve this problem. They developed a pen that worked at zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on practically any surface including crystal, and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300 degrees Celcius. And what did the Russians do? The Russians used a pencil.;-)

2. One of the most memorable case studies on Japanese management techniques was the case of the empty soap box, which occurred in one of Japan’s biggest cosmetics companies. The company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a soap box that was empty. Immediately the authorities isolated the problem to the assembly line, which transported all the packaged boxes of soap to the delivery department. For some reason, one soap box went through the assembly line empty. Management asked its engineers to solve the problem. Post-haste, the engineers worked hard to devise an X-ray machine with high-resolution monitors manned by two people to watch all the soap boxes that passed through the line, to make sure they were not empty. No doubt, they worked hard and they worked fast but they spent whoopee amount of time and money to do so. But when a rank-and-file employee in a small company was posed with the Same problem, he did not get into the complications of X-rays, etc but instead came out with another solution. He bought a strong industrial electric fan and pointed it at the assembly line. He switched the fan on, and as each soap box passed the fan, it simply blew the empty boxes out of the line.

Another case which I read from my mail inbox is as follows

A 50 feet long trailer having 48″ wheels got stuck while entering a midtown tunnel in New York because it was approximately 2.5 feet taller than the height of the tunnel. The fire department and the state department of transportation spent the whole day searching for a solution, to no avail. Then a child, aged about 9 years, asked his father, “Why can’t they take out the air from the tyre tubes? The height will automatically come down.”

If you look at what you do not have in life, you don’t have anything. If you look at what you have in life, you have
Everything.

So simple isn’t it…… 🙂

 I thought, it would be better to include a post in My Blog,  as many of my friends  asked me this question.  So I am here with some reasons Why I am using Pyhton, as a main Programming Language for the development(both system as well as application side).

One and half year ago, I  Fell in LOVE with Python.  It was “Love in first Program” 🙂  I wrote famous program “Hello World”. It was amazing… I included only a line to do that.. yes “print ‘Hello World’.  The program gave the output on the screen “Hello World”.

Now coming back to the title of the post, Why I am using Python. There are lot of reasons for this question. Python helped in my day-today coding  activities. I solved lot of problems of programming within the short span of time. For strart-up companies like ours, python is God’s gift.

Besides the Python Features,  I would like to share my views on Python.

Best for Application/System Programming:

Being an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language that combines remarkable power with very clear syntax. Python can be used to solve the many issues related with System Administrations. Challenges like, Release Management of the Application Software. Taking the Back-up of the Disk, Managing Users, can be programmed in Python without any difficulties. Now coming to Application Side Programming, lot of tools, web frameworks, libraries are available in Python which can used for the Application development. I use a web framework called Django, (Webframework developed using Pyhton)in most of the Web application. The other python web framework are Pylons, TurboGears,  Zope,  web2py

A huge collection of Libraries

Unlike the Perl’s CPAN, Python’s standard library is very extensive. The library contains built-in modules (written in C) that provide access to system functionality such as file I/O that would otherwise be inaccessible to Python programmers, as well as modules written in Python that provide standardized solutions for many problems that occur in everyday programming. Some of these modules are explicitly designed to encourage and enhance the portability of Python programs by abstracting away platform-specifics into platform-neutral APIs.In addition to the standard library, there is a growing collection of several thousand components (from individual programs and modules to packages and entire application development frameworks),

Interfaces

Python provides interfaces to many commercial as well as open source databases. It also has interface for COM, DCOM and ODBC. The programs written in Python can be used in C, C++ and Java. Python is extremely portable with UNIX, Windows, Mac OS/2, BeOS and Cray. It is also feature of Automatic Memory Management.

Supports High-Level Data Types

Along with Standard data types, Python supports high level data types such as List Tuple and Dictionaries. The List, Tuple and Dictionaries are highly useful data types in Python and it is very easy to handle. The powerful feature of Python is Regular Expression. It is one of the awesome feature of Python. The other data types are binary data, introspections. It is also possible to define the new ‘built-in’ datatypes.

Supports Meta-programming

According to Wikipedia Metaprogramming is the writing of computer programs that write or manipulate other programs (or themselves) as their data, or that do part of the work at runtime that would otherwise be done at compile time. Not all meta-programming involves generative programming. If programs are modifiable at runtime or if an incremental compilation is available then techniques can be used to perform meta-programming without actually generating source code. It is possible to meta-program in python using Python Decorators. I don’t have much knowledge in Meta-programming .

These are my thoughts on Python Programming Language.