Dumb python questions

[Martijn Faassen]

Paul Rubin <phr-n2001 at nightsong.com> wrote:
[snip]
> I think as a work of pure language design, Python is excellent despite
> a few minor warts.  I'm less impressed by the current runtime library
> which I think is less well developed than those of Perl, Java, Common
> Lisp, etc.  Python is supposed to be a "batteries included" language
> but I think it would benefit if the implementers flipped through the
> manuals for Perl, CL, etc. and made Python counterparts to those
> languages' library functions when there was a reason to do so.  That
> would save a lot of experimenting and evolution.  Why reinvent the
> wheel?

That'd probably be helpful. I agree that the standard library could use
some work. That, and the mythical CPAN like 'catalog' that takes forever
in arriving because we take really small steps at the time. :)   

Please note that there's a large amount of third party modules as well,
you can find them here: http://www.vex.net/parnassus
 
> Python's online documentation is also nowhere near as thorough as
> Perl's.  I see on amazon.com that there's a 900 page O'Reilly Python
> book that I can buy, but if I have to buy a separate book to get
> important info, then the distribution isn't really self contained.  So
> this needs improvement too.

I've learned Python and used it fine with the online documentation; I've 
always liked it, and haven't found many gaps, except in some of the
extending/embedding stuff. What needs to be improved? I suppose more module
usage examples would be nice.

[snip]
> I think I'm reacting not as much to language differences as to
> differences in system maturity.  Whenever I write something in Perl or
> CL, and I need to do something like turn an array into a string,

Do you mean a Python list? ''.join(mylist)

> somebody seems to have faced that problem before and it's been taken
> care of in some reasonably thought-out way.  In Python, I often feel
> like I'm doing something that hasn't been done much before.

In part I suspect that's due to your inexperience with the language, but
please keep pointing out the things that are missing. :)

[snip] 
> CL resulted from a huge body of code written in other
> Lisp systems and Perl is at release 5.6 or so now.  Python is at
> release 2.1 or 2.2.  It's probably ahead of Perl version 2.2 but it
> still has a lot of catching up to do.

Lisp has a decades old history, granted, but don't let Python's version
number mislead you. I mean, it's about a decade old by now. While Perl
is half a decade older, it's not as if version numbers really mean a lot. :)

Python-2.2-already-better-than-Perl-2.2-ly yours,

Martijn
-- 
History of the 20th Century: WW1, WW2, WW3?
No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?