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Let's not start another discussion about programming languages, but for the record: On Wed, May 07, 2014 at 09:49:16AM -0400, Molly Des Jardin wrote: > This is not a complex point, but I've been using Python about since it came > out (since 2002) and have found it both flexible and very easy to learn and Python came out in 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_%28programming_language%29 > use. I'd recommend it as a scripting language for beginning programmers and > those experimenting around. Python was designed as a teaching language. Today, it is a universal programming language suitable for all tasks. Low-level (systems) and performance critical functions can be written in C if required. At Bielefeld University Library we use Python for rapidly prototyping Web services based on the Flask framework. These services have proven stable and efficient, so there has been no need to re-write them for production use. Examples include an online OAI-PMH validator <http://oval.base-search.net/>, a classifier for assinging DDC labels to English or German abstracts <http://clfapi.base-search.net/>, and an OAI-PMH interface for BASE, the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine. If you work closely with researchers, it might be relevant to you that Python has become the dominant language in scientific programming because of great progress in the NumPy/SciPy/pandas frameworks. The majority of our software is still developed in Perl – for historical reasons, and because there are exciting new frameworks in Perl such as the ETL framework Catmandu <http://librecat.org/>. Cheers Christian -- Christian Pietsch http://purl.org/net/pietsch