Python: Database to Web Part II (and "teaching language")

[Ville Vainio]

paul at boddie.net (Paul Boddie) writes:

> I haven't seen any particularly notable bias towards "newbies" in this
> group. Anyway, if people want to go and develop their applications

True, this group seems to be perhaps the most enjoyable among the
language newsgroups I have browsed. Not too much "how should I learn
C++".

I'm talking about the tutorial here. There is a line that says "... or
perhaps you're not sufficiently familiar with C.". It just might scare
away some potential Python programmers. Familiarity with C is rarely a
problem for people - slow, tedious and error-prone development
is. When I mentioned Python to one of my colleagues, ha said he had
has the impression that Python was for people who can't learn some
other language (which, according to anecdotal evindce, seems to be the
very opposite of the truth - python people seem to know lots of
languages).

> entirely in C (as seems to be fashionable in certain open source
> circles), because they believe that Python isn't for real programmers
> or is too slow or "wasteful", then they can feel free to do so and
> waste their own time in the process.

C is also kinda fun, if you have lots of time, are doing nothing
complicated or playing with something that doesn't need to be run in a
production environment.

> Edward's right in one respect: stop concentrating on language issues
> and start concentrating on library issues. It's shocking but

I think the Python library is excellent, and the only thing I miss is
the database thing. 

I actually read the library reference docs every now and then just for
fun, enjoying all the beautiful and useful stuff there (that I
probably won't even use - knowing that they are there and how they
work is justy comforting). People doing the documentation for python
reserve special commendation.

> illustrative that many people claim to choose Perl for work purely on
> the basis of library availability for that language.

Perl DBI seems to be one one of the Perl's killer apps... 

-- 
Ville Vainio - http://www.tp.spt.fi/~vvainio - ICQ #115524762
 Wild geese have no intention to cast a reflection
 Water has no mind to assume their form