the traditional "fooand "barfor generic variable names become "spamand "eggsin the python world the occasional "brian,"ni,and "shrubberylikewise owe their appearances to this namesake it even impacts the python community at largesome events at python conferences are regularly billed as "the spanish inquisition all of this isof coursevery funny if you are familiar with the showsbut less so otherwise you don' need to be familiar with monty python' work to make sense of examples that borrow references from itincluding many you will see in this bookbut at least you now know their root (hey-- 've warned you how does python stack up to language xfinallyto place it in the context of what you may already knowpeople sometimes compare python to languages such as perltcland java this section summarizes common consensus in this department want to note up front that ' not fan of winning by disparaging the competition-it doesn' work in the long runand that' not the goal here moreoverthis is not zero sum game--most programmers will use many languages over their careers neverthelessprogramming tools present choices and tradeoffs that merit consideration after allif python didn' offer something over its alternativesit would never have been used in the first place we talked about performance tradeoffs earlierso here we'll focus on functionality while other languages are also useful tools to know and usemany people find that pythonis more powerful than tcl python' strong support for "programming in the largemakes it applicable to the development of larger systemsand its library of application tools is broader is more readable than perl python has clear syntax and simplecoherent design this in turn makes python more reusable and maintainableand helps reduce program bugs is simpler and easier to use than java and cpython is scripting languagebut java and cboth inherit much of the complexity and syntax of larger oop systems languages like +is simpler and easier to use than +python code is simpler than the equivalent +and often one-third to one-fifth as largethough as scripting languagepython sometimes serves different roles is simpler and higher-level than python' detachment from underlying hardware architecture makes code less complexbetter structuredand more approachable than cc++' progenitor how does python stack up to language