Yahoo! Launches Python Developer Center

SimonW writes "Yahoo! has launched a Python Developer Center as part of their Developer Network. The new site explains how to access Yahoo!'s many web service APIs using Python, and includes tutorials on using Python with REST, JSON, XML and RSS. The site joins Yahoo!'s existing developer centers for PHP and JavaScript."

Howto

[kevin_conaway]

Furthermore, unlike their previous offerings, they have released little new code here. The only code they have released is an API to their search engine. The rest seem to be HOWTOs on how to python to access their services.

Still good info though. Thanks

Great, and good packages

[masklinn]

Not only did they release a nice guide, but the guide is actually good: while the first XML library they talk about in XML parsing is xml.dom.minidom, they also explain how to use the XML API with effbot's ElementTree (and link to both ElementTree and cElementTree), which is more than likely the best Python XML library. And the recommend UFP (Universal Feed Parser) for RSS parsing.

The worst thing you can say about them is that they did their homework, kudos to the Yahoo guys.

Re:Whython

[carlivar]

yp.yahoo.com uses Python.

Re:Snakes are naturally quiet

[abigor]

Python is used commercially all over the place. My friend bought Civilization IV, and I was astounded to see it supports game modifications via Python. Meanwhile, I read an interview with the guy behind PyQt, the Python bindings for Trolltech's Qt library, and he said he has over 200 commercial users - including Disney, Pixar, and Industrial Light and Magic. All of these companies use Python and Qt, an extremely powerful app development environment if I've ever seen one. It seems like a natural match.

So the reason you don't hear Python hype is because the language simply doesn't need it. Ruby hasn't "arrived" yet, so its supporters are more vocal. It's all very similar to desktop Linux.

Re:Whitespace

[bhaberman]

No lambdas, no ternary operator (yes I know, not pythonic), no switch statement (think Ruby, not C++), scoping rules are wrong (for example, list comprehensions leak variables - C++ for loops don't!).

Underscores! __init__ __new__ __getattr__ __setattr__ __len__ __getitem__ . . . .

range(1,5) = [1, 2, 3, 4]

The list goes on and on and on and on and on. Python has an incredible number of infuriating misfeatures for such a useful language.

Python sort of pretends to be a functional language, and you can do a lot of functional-style things in python, but even Perl is much better at doing these things than Python.

My favorite part of Python is the whitespace rule! The way I see it, you're indenting your program anyways, so braces are just redundant. It makes Python code quite beautiful and virtually eliminates unreadable code. In fact, Python is just a wonderful language to write in in general because its design enforces good programming practices and makes it easy to produce incredibly maintainable programs. But sometimes these features (read limitations, and lots of them) are quite frustrating. Yes, Guido, map and filter suck, but only because Python lambdas suck. And nested list comprehensions look awful. And sometimes you really do want a one-liner.

My three favorite languages now are Perl, Python, and Haskell. Perl because it is useful, even though it is a terrible language (Perl 6 is awesome though). Python because it is wonderfully easy to code in. Haskell because it is beautiful and makes my head hurt. Incidentally, Haskell also relies on whitespace, which I guess means that meaningful whitespace is officially a Good Thing, as defined by leading computer scientists.

The interesting thing I think is that Ruby, though much cleaner than Python and much more expressive, is much much harder for me to read. I don't like the mix of pure OO and functional style so much either. It seems like a wonderful language, but once Perl 6 comes out I can't really see it being so relevant.