Convenience of developing in Python

Convenience of developing in Python

No - the main reason you need to run and test today is that the spec you're given now is "show me it doing something, and I'll tell you if it's the right thing or not".

This is because the people who want you to write software for them generally find it difficult to explain to you precisely and unambiguously enough, up front, what they want that software to actually do in the end and how.

Software development would be so much easier if all one had to do was to write some code based on a pre-existing complete, correct, and unambiguous specification of the job to be done. The problem is that writing that type of specification in the first place is about as difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone as writing the code itself, and therefore this tends to be attempted only in exceptional circumstances.

In the meantime, the rest of the software development world has adopted “agile” development practices which usually involve iteratively building increasingly refined versions of the code until the customer is satisfied, at which point the result may or may not have anything to do with what the customer would have been able to describe meaningfully at the start.