During my last week on the job at GFDL, the manager there asked if I’d put together a presentation about Python, geared toward people who had been using Perl, or people who hadn’t done a lot of scripting at all. I said I’d do it so long as there weren’t any really advanced coders in the room who were going to fire advanced garbage collection or memory management questions at me or something.
The short story is that there was a computer scientist in the room who uses Python quite frequently, by choice. He uses Java and Perl as well, but often chooses Python because, he says, it’s the easiest way to get things done in a lot of cases.
Anyway, *he* said I did a good job, so if anyone else wants to check out the slides, it’s easy enough to do, because I used Google Docs to put it together. There aren’t any notes – the point of the slides is just to explain to the audience some of the things that are illustrated by the interactive session output, mostly. Enjoy!