Looking ahead a little, I would note that Software Carpentry
(www.software-carpentry.com), which is providing some serious money to
stimulate development of open-source tools for next-generation software
development (replacements for make, autoconf, gnats/bugzilla/etc. bug
tracking, and expect/dejagnu/etc. unit testing) has settled on the choice
of Python as a scripting language for all their new tools. use. From their FAQ:
>Python provides the same functionality as Perl or Tcl, but has proved to
>be easier to learn, read, and remember. (For example, words like "except"
>and "unless" appear much less often in Python reference material than they
>do in Perl reference material.) The number of books on Python is growing
>rapidly, as is the number of modules and libraries. Finally, the Python
>community is still small enough for a project like this one to attract a
>lot of attention.
Thus, we can expect that if this project comes to fruition, there will be a
new generation of development tools that support Python as a scripting
language, so there would be some advantages to choosing Python in scripting
CVS.
Of course, software-carpentry would like ultimately to see a
next-generation of version-control to improve upon cvs, but they decided
that this would be too large a project for their first go-round.
Jonathan
