How the ICE Python came to be

I've been reading stuff on programming languages via Tim Bray's ongoing site. I liked the pieces by Steve Yegge, who now chooses Ruby. What's more he has a bike analogy:

If languages are bicycles, then Awk is a pink kiddie bike with a white basket and streamers coming off the handlebars, Perl is a beach cruiser (remember how cool they were? Gosh.) and Ruby is a $7,500 titanium mountain bike. The leap from Perl to Ruby is as significant as the leap from C++ to Java, but without any of the downside, because Ruby's essentially a proper superset of Perl's functionality, whereas Java took some things away that people missed, and didn't offer real replacements for them.

http://www.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/tour-de-babel.html

(I have never ridden a $7,500 titanium mountain bike, but maybe I can find out what it's like by writing some Ruby.)

I thought this might be a good time to talk about why we chose to write the cross-platform publishing Integrated Content Environment (ICE) in Python about a year ago.

1. We needed to integrate with OpenOffice.org which ships with Python built-in, so there's likely to be lots of example of Python code to draw on.

2. While we had a team well qualified and practiced with Java, none of us had any confidence that we could get a cross platform Java application to run correctly. I couldn't get simple applets written by the USQ team to run in Firefox at the time and I simply dreaded having to go to Sun's site to download Java! Which one do I need? JDK, JRE who knows? And how do I run a Java thing I've downloaded? Classpath? What?

3. Python allows us to compile stand-alone applications for Windows and OS X.

4. Chandler, the new über Personal Information Manager project is using Python. The OSAF team did their homework and bet on Python. And ICE was aimed at a similar community, starting with Higher Education just like Chandler. One day ICE, or part of it may even become a Chandler module.

5. Python is a good language, mostly consistent and easy to test. I think that Python's whitespace makes for readable, more consistent code, It bypasses the need to document at least some aspects of a coding standard.

   We use py.test for our unit test framework, in addition to UTF-X for testing XSLT.

Some things are less than ideal.

Python has pretty feeble native XML support, lacking the crucial XPath and XSLT out of the box. We use libxml2 and libsxtl, which work in not very Pythonic way but get the job done.

But why not Ruby, and possibly Rails?

Ruby's profile a year ago was nothing like it is now so we didn't really consider it. I think if we were to start ICE now, it would be worth a look. It can be compiled into stand-alone executables just like Python. There would be lots of work to do, though to find out about subversion libraries and OpenOffice.org integration.