Why Python

Jon Peck

We are sometimes asked why we use Python as the main programmability and scripting language in IBM SPSS Statistics.  Here's a quote from a story dated October 17, 2011  InfoWorld Developer_World article here.
The article is entitled From PHP to Perl: What's hot, what's not in scripting languages.

Hot scripting language: Python
In a sense, the tipping point for Python came when the housing market crashed.
For those stuck trying to decode bond market prospectuses to figure out who got paid what when the bankruptcy dominoes were done falling, one thing became clear: English is a weaselly language, and some weaselly folks revel in its ambiguities to profit from complicated derivatives.
Enter one smart group that offered a compelling solution: Force every bond to come with a Python program that defined who got paid and when they were paid. While they may have been a bit too hopeful about the power of computer languages, the proposal spoke to Python's growing acceptance in the greater world of smart people who aren't computer geeks. Relatively easy to pick up, Python is becoming increasingly popular in economic research, science departments, and biology labs.
I'm not so sure about the bond market idea(!), but Python excels in its combination of clarity, flexibility, and power.   And, case in point, statistics and data analysis.  SPSS began embedding Python with version 14 way back in 2005.  As of October, the TIOBE index shows Python as the 8th most popular programming language overall FWIW.  While this is only a partial view of language usage, it confirms again that Python is a class A language.