Chris Dent on HTTP
Get an expert opinion on the concepts you learned in this chapter.
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Asking an expert
Following is a conversation with an experienced Python developer Chris Dent on the topic of HTTP.
Chris Dent
| Q: Hey Chris! Could you introduce yourself and explain how you came to Python? |
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| A: I have been working as a sysadmin or developer, somewhere near the Internet, since the early 90s. These days, I write and review code in the world of OpenStack. For the ten or so years before joining that community, I worked on creating tools and processes to enhance small group collaboration, mostly related to wikis. |
| I first used Python around 2002 to hack some functionality into the MoinMoin wiki. At the time the programming language I used the most was Perl, and the meaningful whitespace and other constraints presented by Python put me off. Five years later, when I finished working with a medium-sized team on a large Perl codebase for an enterprise wiki (Socialtext), I was given the freedom to choose a language when starting my new project (TiddlyWeb). I had narrowed my choice down to either Ruby or Python. I made the choice to use Python based on a small number of concerns: |
| - I had Perl fatigue. I wanted as little syntactic sugar as possible (no #, $, @, or {}) and as much helpful constraint as possible. This quickly ruled out Ruby. Ruby and Perl are great, but in my experience, Python is better in situations where there are multiple or ephemeral developers. |
| - I liked WSGI. |
| - My project was intended as a reference to be replicated in other languages. Python’s readability was a big win. |
| Since then, Python has become my language of choice for most projects, personal and professional. |
| Q: Why do you like WSGI? What do you enjoy in this specification? Does it offer anything more than other protocols around? |
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| A: I did my first programming for the web with CGI. WSGI built on that simplicity and made it better by providing a very pure functional and composable interface to go along with the structure in environ. So, when I learned about it, it was familiar but more powerful and more flexible. I liked that it was based on Python primitives and had no requirement in terms of special libraries or objects. |
| I had been a long time user of mod_perl under Apache, and while it worked well, I did not like that |