Python Experience from a Julia Perspective

I wrote Python scripts a long time ago. For the past year, I’ve mainly used Julia for my scripting needs. I have a bunch of scripts I need to share with other people and I don’t want to require people to have Julia installed, so I am trying to rewrite my scripts to Python.

Here are some of my observations about using Python again after primarily using Julia for my scripting needs.

First Impressions

The built in Python REPL is very bare bones compared to what you get out of the box after installing Julia. Julia gives you nice syntax coloring and completion. You can easily lookup docs for a function by hitting ? and it completes. Using Python’s help() feels rather clunky in comparison. Also, I find reading Julia docs far easier and straight forward.

I get this from writing help(“print”) in Python:

print_stmt ::= "print" ([expression ("," expression)* [","]]
                  | ">>" expression [("," expression)+ [","]])

"print" evaluates each expression in turn and writes the resulting
object to standard output (see below).  If an object is not a string,
it is first converted to a string using the rules for string

While for Julia when I write ?print I get:

earch: print println print_joined print_escaped print_shortest print_unescaped print_with_color sprint @printf isprint @sprintf

  print(x)

  Write (to the default output stream) a canonical (un-decorated) text…