[Info-vax] Python on VMS

[Neil Rieck]

On Monday, January 14, 2019 at 7:25:10 PM UTC-5, John E. Malmberg wrote:
[...snip...]
> Regards,
> -John

Be very careful with Python. You would have thought that backward compatibility would have been built in but you would be very wrong. For example, almost all the stuff builtin to current Linux distros requires ver 2.6 or 2.7 but newer versions can be installed to co-exist with 2.x "if you are careful"

Last year, someone on our team carelessly installed ver 3.5 which broke YUM, the FIREWALL tool (both CLI and GUI) as well as some other stuff.

http://neilrieck.net/docs/openvms_notes_linux.html#realworldlinuxproblems

Just yesterday (2019-01-15), someone tried to cut over a new project which failed. Why? Python needed to be upgraded to ver 3.6 to match the new libraries required to do Active Directory authentication.

Comment-1: I have been installing run-time libraries into VAX, Alpha and Itanium for 31-years and have never experienced any breakage with compiled programs. Many of these systems just continue to run forever. Systems requiring a specific version of Python are just one careless upgrade away from failure.

Comment-2: Python is "very powerful" with interfaces into almost everything including MySQL and MariaDB
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)

Comment-3: I started in computing by learning "interpreted BASIC" on an Apple2. Compiled languages (COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, BASIC, C, C++) on minicomputers changed everything for me. I am ending my career learning "interpreted Python" on udemy

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
http://neilrieck.net