To provide the iSeries platform, and specifically OS/400, with the Python language for the purpose of extremely rapid application development beyond the capabilities of the native iSeries RPG and CL languages.

IBM's iSeries minicomputer is an amazingly capable and stable platform.

It's main drawback has been the lack of a standard, easy to use modern RAD language, or at least something that non-Java programmers could use.

iSeriesPython fills that need.

This Python port is not meant as a replacement for RPG and CL, but rather provides a path to rapid object oriented development beyond those languages' capabilities. There are many things RPG does better than Python...and conversely many things that take minutes in Python, where they would take a good RPG coder several days.

The author can personally attest to the effectiveness at work here:

Recently, a project to simply create a report based on some existing data had taken a slightly-rusty RPG coder dozens of hours, produced an application several hundred lines long, and still wasn't working properly.

Having never seen Python before, with a little guidance the developer had a working Python version of the report, complete with a CL command to call it, in under 5 hours.