Bugzilla Talk:Languages

On Python cons

• Not having curly-braces on "if" statements and other blocks makes long blocks hard to read.
  • I think this is mostly a red herring. First, you should not write long blocks to begin with. Second, I've used Python almost exclusively in a large project for over three years and this has rarely been a problem.

• Poor Unicode handling--strings are ASCII by default, and are Unicode only if you prepend them with u, like u"string".
  • I think u"" can easily be enforced as a coding policy. Depending on how ambitious your Unicode needs are, Python Unicode may not be enough for you. For Chandler we created PyICU to fix cases where Python's natural Unicode support falls short.

• No standard way of installing modules like CPAN.
  • There is: Python eggs. These are pretty new, though, so not all projects make eggs or upload them to cheeseshop (equivalent to cpan).

• Python has no equivalent to Perl's "taint" mode.
  • I know of some attempts at this, and I believe Zope has a sandbox thingy as well, so the situation is probably not as bleak as you think.