Evaluating Scripting Languages : How Python Can Help Political Methodologists

Why Python?Political methodologists tend to make passionate statements about their software tools. The PolMeth mailing list frequently gives strong advocacy for the use of Linux, LATEX, Emacs and other specific programmes. For statistical analysis R has become the mainstream programming language. However, frequent encouragements to use PHP for web purposes or Perl for various scripting tasks highlight the need for a major scripting language beside R. Once political scientists need systematic parsing of markup languages or have to generate web presentations from their data, R quickly reaches its limits. For me, Python has become my favourite scripting language of choice. Having had some previous exposure to C, Java, PHP and Perl, Python turned out to meet all my needs for software development, that R can not fulfil. So let me introduce you to the beauty of Python