age of new pythonistas [was: The Editor Poll results are in!]

[RPM1]

"Alan Winston" <awinston at scn.org> wrote in message
news:9udn1g$64c$1 at brokaw.wa.com...
> > it'd also be cool to see the relative age of new pythonistas -- I
suspect
> > that they're young, but this is completely unfounded.
>

37

I make my living coding C.  I have recently begun coding all my own projects
in Python.  I also write utilities at work in Python that other programmers
end up 'borrowing'.  I've found that I can whip up some cool utilities in
Python that could have been coded in C but it wouldn't have been worth the
effort.  For example, something that only takes 45 minutes to code in Python
would probably have taken 3 or 4 hours in C.  One example, is a utility that
parses a C .h file to get the structure of records in a C binary file, and
then reads in the records and prints them out in readable format.  What made
this hard to code in C was the fact that our customers have different
structures and different byte alignments.  With Python, I just give it the
name of the data file, the name of the .h file and the alignment and it
spits out the data with no problem.

My brother ,(who's mentioned in the thank you's of "Learning Python"),
tipped me off to Python back in 1996, but I never got around to doing much
with it until about a year ago.

Patrick Mullhaupt