Python considered harmful?

Yesterday morning I started writing a simple tool which should compile all C++ files in a given directory tree. Ok, simple enough, it’s just a matter of a simple os.walk and some subprocess.call.

After that, I thought that it would be nice if the tool did something more. For example, I could write down a function that was able to “make clean” the executables I built. This is simple as well. You just have to be smart since on *nix executables do not have extensions. And I could make the system Windows friendly. It was a matter of a couple of functions more.

However, at that point I needed some kind of interface. A simple command line tool was nice. But... well, I remembered using a Prolog tool which did some heuristic to get wrong commands right (zsh does this as well)... so, why not? A levenshtein distance + some more checks could do. And it did. Nice.

But... what if I just want to compile one single file? Well, I had already most of the infrastructure. And why not letting me specify a single file to clean? As easy as breathing. Done. By the way, the system at that point supported building and cleaning object files as well.

And I was already wondering that I left out C files. After all I needed to process C++ files, but the tool would be surely more useful if I could use it with C files too. And why not Pascal? Ok, I have the right design which could support kind of configuration to map file types to compilers... and I could parametrize compiler options as well. Somewhere in my mind an automated compiler detection system was already lurking.

I refactored the tool. It became a package, with a lot of useful functions... But well... why rebuilding all the sources? I need only to rebuild executables which are older than their source file. This is easy, a couple of stat...

At that point I realized that if only I added some kind of file dependency discovery I would have basically reinvented make. That is to say I was reinventing a square wheel. One of these days I’ll get the very first script and modify so that instead of compiling files generates a CMakeLists.txt, calls cmake and then Make.

The end of the story is developing in Python is too fast. :P

BTW: the author is not suggesting Python should not be used, just the opposite!