REVIEW: Video - Introducing Python

I just stumbled on this student film called "A Python Love Story" which was made in 2001 by a group of high school students in Yorktown High School (Arlington, Virginia) with help of a Computer Science Teacher named Jeff Elkner who wrote How to Think Like a Computer Scientist:Learning with Python.

After spending about half an hour watching this video, I've learned this is not only funny but very educational video for introducing Python. You'll see an interview with Guido van Rossum who is the author of the Python programming language and an interview with the famous Eric S. Raymond (Also Known As ESR) who also wrote an excellent article Why Python? in LinuxJournal.

Here is the mpeg video of Introduing Python: http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/pyBiblio/pythonvideo.php. Enjoy!

What is Python?

Python is a clear and powerful object-oriented programming language, comparable to Perl, Tcl, Scheme, or Java. For more information, please visit http://python.org/

Why Python?

According to Jeff Elkner in the Preface in his book,
"I needed a language that would run on the machines in our Linux lab as well as on the Windows and Macintosh platforms most students have at home. I wanted it to be open source, so that students could use it at home regardless of their income. I wanted a language that was used by professional programmers, and one that had an active developer community around it. It had to support both procedural and object-oriented programming. And most importantly, it had to be easy to learn and teach. When I investigated the choices with these goals in mind, Python stood out as the best candidate for the job."

Thanks to Kevin Altis, there is even a quicktime version at: http://www.python.org/other/python.mov

He edited out the "love story" sequences and reduced the overall video to around 15 minutes making it more suitable for presentations to managers. The Quicktime version is also much smaller, only 68MB.

He also maintains his own "Why Phython?" page