Martian Integrations

The core of extensible programming is defining functions. Python allows mandatory and optional arguments, keyword arguments, and even arbitrary argument lists. Whether you're new to programming or an experienced developer, it's easy to learn and use Python. Python can be easy to pick up whether you're a first-time programmer or you're experienced with other languages. The following pages are a useful first step to get on your way to writing programs with Python! The community hosts conferences and meetups to collaborate on code, and much more. Python's documentation will help you along the way, and the mailing lists will keep you in touch. The Python Package Index (PyPI) hosts thousands of third-party modules for Python. Both Python's standard library and the community-contributed modules allow for endless possibilities.

As an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime, Node.js is designed to build scalable network applications. Upon each connection, the callback is fired, but if there is no work to be done, Node.js will sleep. This is in contrast to today's more common concurrency model, in which OS threads are employed. Thread-based networking is relatively inefficient and very difficult to use. Furthermore, users of Node.js are free from worries of dead-locking the process, since there are no locks. Almost no function in Node.js directly performs I/O, so the process never blocks except when the I/O is performed using synchronous methods of Node.js standard library. Because nothing blocks, scalable systems are very reasonable to develop in Node.js. Node.js is similar in design to, and influenced by, systems like Ruby's Event Machine and Python's Twisted. Node.js takes the event model a bit further. It presents an event loop as a runtime construct instead of as a library.