Python

/pi:´thon/

In the words of its author, “the other scripting language” (other than Perl, that is). Python’s design is notably clean, elegant, and well thought through; it tends to attract the sort of programmers who find Perl grubby and exiguous. Some people revolt at its use of whitespace to define logical structure by indentation, objecting that this harks back to the horrible old fixed-field languages of the 1960s. Python’s relationship with Perl is rather like the BSD community’s relationship to Linux — it’s the smaller party in a (usually friendly) rivalry, but the average quality of its developers is generally conceded to be rather higher than in the larger community it competes with. There’s a Python resource page at http://www.python.org. See also Guido, BDFL.