Python is the single computing language with the widest span: it effectively tackles more problems than even C or Java, which most programmers regard as the standards for versatility in software.

That's what I've asserted, at least, in articles and courses for seven years. While a minority of my own coding involves Python, for various business reasons, I've only grown more certain of the conclusion during that interval.

Even if your enthusiasm for the language doesn't match mine, though, you owe it to yourself to know the most important tasks Python can take on in a typical Windows programming environment.

Most magazines and books do not mention:

• Python does COM;
• Python does .NET;
• Python does Java better than Java;
• Python is high-performance; and
• Python talks to hardware.

Everyone knows that VC++ and VB are the ways to program COM work. Not me, though; it's been several years since I've used either for that purpose. Python gives me full ability to construct both COM clients and servers. The language does this not only more compactly and elegantly than either VC++ or VB, but with full interactivity: I can experiment at a Python interactive prompt. This is particularly valuable during COM work, because the COM servers I interface are often only partially documented.

Even with the most widely-known examples of COM, though, Python is a winner. Python inventor Guido van Rossum points out that "SpamBayes [is] a very successful personal spam fiter which integrates with Outlook via COM." SpamBayes is open-sourced, like many Python projects, so you can view the source and see for yourself how it works. Note, though, that you are equally free to use Python for proprietary products.

If you do look in the SpamBayes source, you'll see that the message-store manager of the Outlook 2000 part of the project, for example, embeds this self-testing definition which prints an inbox's contents to the standard output stream:

def test():
          from win32com.client import Dispatch
          outlook = Dispatch("Outlook.Application")
          inbox = outlook.Session.GetDefaultFolder(constants.olFolderInbox)
          folder_id = inbox.Parent.StoreID, inbox.EntryID
          store = MAPIMsgStore()
          for folder in store.GetFolderGenerator([folder_id,], True):
              print folder
              for msg in folder.GetMessageGenerator():
                  print msg
          store.Close()

Judge for yourself how readable this is compared to its C++ or VB equivalents.

COM isn't an isolated strength of Python on Windows, incidentally. One of the first books focused on the language was Python: Programming on Win32, and the language is a good vehicle not just for such older technologies as DDE and MFC, but also still-growing .NET.