ArcGIS has been in development since the 1970s. Since that time, it has included a variety of programming languages and tools to help GIS users automate analysis and map production. These include the Avenue scripting language in the ArcGIS 3x series, and the ARC Macro Language (AML) in the ARCInfo Workstation days, as well as VBScript up until ArcGIS 10x, when Python was introduced. Another useful tool introduced in ArcGIS 9x was ModelBuilder, a visual programming environment used for both modeling analysis and creating tools that can be used repeatedly with different input feature classes.
A useful feature of ModelBuilder is an export function, which allows modelers to create Python scripts directly from a model. This makes it easier to compare how parameters in a ModelBuilder tool are accepted as compared to how a Python script calls the same tool and supplies its...