wellthe meaning of pythonanyway in the preface of this booki promised that we' return to the issue of python' roles after seeing how it is used in practice so in closinghere are some subjective comments on the broader implications of the language most of this conclusion remains unchanged since the first edition of this book was penned in but so are the factors that pushed python into the development spotlight as mentioned in the preface sidebarpython' focus is on concepts such as qualityproductivityportabilityand integration hope that this book has demonstrated some of the benefits of that focus in action along the waywe've seen python applied to systems programminggui developmentinternet scriptingdatabase and text processingand more and we've witnessed firsthand the application of the language and its libraries to realistically scaled software development taskswhich go above and beyond what many classify as "scripting hope you've also had some funthattoois part of the python story in this conclusioni wish now to return to the forest after our long walk among the trees--to revisit python' roles in more concrete terms in particularpython' role as prototyping tool can profoundly affect the development cycle "something' wrong with the way we program computersthis has to be one of the most overused lines in the business stillgiven time to ponder the big picturemost of us would probably agree that we're not quite there yet over the last few decadesthe computer software industry has made significant progress on streamlining the development task (anyone remember dropping punch cards?but at the same timethe cost of developing potentially useful computer applications is often still high enough to make them impractical moreoversystems built using modern tools and paradigms are often delivered far behind schedule software engineering remains largely defiant of the sort of quantitative measurements employed in other engineering fields in the software worldit' not uncommon to take one' best time estimate for new project and multiply by factor of two or three to account for unforeseen overheads in the development task this situation is clearly unsatisfactory for software managersdevelopersand end users the "gilligan factorit has been suggestedtongue in cheekthat if there were patron saint of software engineersthe honor would fall on none other than gilliganthe character in the pervasively popular american television show of the sgilligan' island gilligan is the enigmaticsneaker-clad first matewidely held to be responsible for the shipwreck that stranded the now-residents of the island conclusionpython and the development cycle