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by microtonal 5620 days ago
Maybe not, but it is certainly used as one. Everything from package managers (yum) to operating system installers (Anaconda) have been written in Python.

Besides that, the grandparent is right: possibly every situation where Python was used as a systems programming language, Haskell could fit in (and more).

1 comments

I think you're confused to what "systems" programming entails. User-space packaging with a bunch of scripts is not systems programming. OS installers is not systems programming.

To give you an example of what is systems programming, I have helped developed operating systems kernels, virtual machine monitors, and distributed networked systems. All of these things would be considered systems programming.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_programming for more information.

That's just one definition. Read up on Ousterhout's dichotomy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousterhouts_dichotomy

You should just read http://home.pacbell.net/ouster/scripting.html (his original paper) because all his statements about systems programming languages reinforces my claim that Python is not a systems programming language.