# The depth and breadth of Python

DevFeed: [The depth and breadth of Python](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-depth-and-breadth-of-python-38890.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2011/06/depth-and-breadth-of-python.html>)

Author: Guido van Rossum (noreply@blogger.com)

Published: 2011-06-03T16:17:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Guido van Rossum](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/guido-van-rossum.md>)

Topics: [Python](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/python.md>), [Algorithms](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/algorithms.md>), [Computer science](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/computer-science.md>)

Tags: [academic](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/academic.md>), [algorithms](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/algorithms.md>), [personal](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/personal.md>), [programming-languages](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/programming-languages.md>), [python](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/python.md>), [technology](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/technology.md>)

## AI overview

A personal account of conversations with Python users, emphasizing the language's range from academic algorithm research to practical translation of formal specifications. The article also recounts an anecdote about the origins of Python's indentation-based code blocks.

## Source excerpt

As of late I'm noticing a trend: I'm spending more time having in-person in-depth conversations, and less time coding. While I regret the latter, I really enjoy the former. Certainly more than weekly meetings, code reviews, or bikeshedding email threads. (I'm not all that excited about blogging either, as you may have guessed; but some things just don't fit in 140 characters.) Two conversations with visitors I particularly enjoyed this week were both with very happy Python users, and yet they couldn't be more different. This to me is a confirmation of Python's enduring depth and breadth: it is as far away of a one-trick language as you can imagine. My first visitor was Annie Liu, a professor of computer science (with a tendency to theory :-) at Stony Brook University in New York State. During an animated conversation that lasted nearly three hours (and still she had more to say :-) she explained to me the gist of her research, which appears to be writing small Python programs that implement fundamental algorithms using set comprehensions, and then optimizing the heck out of it using an automated approach she summarized as the three I's: Iterate, incrementalize, and implement. While her academic colleagues laugh at her for her choice of such a non-theoretical language like Python, her students love it, and she seems to be having the last laugh, obtaining publication-worthy results that don't require advanced LaTeX skills, nor writing in a dead language like SETL (of which she is also a great fan, and which, via ABC, had some influence on Python -- see also below). Annie told me an amusing anecdote about an inscrutable security standard produced by NiST a decade ago, with a fifty-page specification written in Z. She took a 12-page portion of it and translated it into a 120-line Python program, which was much more readable than the original, and in the process she uncovered some bugs in the spec! Another anecdote she recounted had reached me before, but somehow I had f