Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The meaning of Python rapid prototyping

I was thinking about the usefulness of rapid prototyping to be a quick preview of a program to see if it works for our business, until I used Python for a large scale system development (Maya based crowd simulation). The meaning of rapid prototyping is not only that! During the project I was designing/coding the system as well as making schedules. As you know in a project where multiple people are working on, it's quite common that there are tasks that can be done only after some other task(s) is completed, and if you have made a schedule you'll know for that reason it's difficult to make a schedule. At the last project I often used Python for rapid prototyping to complete a task to make the team working efficiently, not making a member bored by just waiting for his workmate finish a task. We could rewrite the script in c++ for better performance later when there was enough time. If we had been coding only in c++, the project might have been ended up in failure. Python worked so nice.

Just one caution, you need to be careful to make sure the temporary Python codes are rewritten. It tends to be left unmodified because it's working.

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