Goals include developing programs which are robust and well-maintained; include a flexible, powerful interface; stay within the command-line paradigm (pipes); handles errors and signals; well tested and documented.

We’re dealing with 2.6/2.7 in this session, there are some differences in Python 3 releases.

The slides and code are available at http://www.curiousvenn.com/.

What is a well-behaved application? “Do one thing well”, be UNIX, robustly handle bad input, gracefully handle errors, be well documented, platform aware.

Use Python for its wide platform support; syntax; scalability; extensive library ecosystem.

Scripts should use the following pattern:

if __name__ == 'main':
    print "running"

so that they can be imported for use as a library, testing, etc.