How did using python work for your team?

[virtuald]

Our team just got done at the Boston Regional this week, and we used python to make our bot go. Our team usually releases its code every year, so I'll probably post it later on this week.

I thought using python was a really positive thing for our team. Some positives:

• Really easy to teach to students, and I felt they picked it up faster than they would have picked up C++ or Java
• It was very easy to create a simple test harness to run our code through to help us identify bugs, and it didn't require a ton of code to do it either
• Python is really expressive, and I think it made some aspects of our software design a lot easier
• Prototyping something (and testing it) was really fast, and helped us build things that worked a lot faster

Some negatives:

• If you fat-finger something, it's possible that the robot code would throw an exception in the middle of a match (however, this was largely mitigated by having a comprehensive test program that we ran each time before we uploaded code to the robot)
• I never got around to removing the pyc file generation for our code, but I felt there were some instances where if I didn't delete the pyc files, then the robot would just execute the code cached there instead of using code that was just uploaded to the robot

I'm curious to see who else used it for competition this year. What successes/failures did using python bring you?