The Ideals of a Python Hacker (was: Poll Results)

[Jonathan Gardner]

On Friday 30 November 2001 07:39 am, Roy Katz wrote:
> (and I find that Python fits in with my youthful ideals nicely among
> others such as Esperanto & being vegan)
>

Interesting... how does Python and veganism go together? Isn't veganism just 
about taking care of the animals and your body? What does Python care about 
the animals or your body?

> I remember a long thread about Esperanto and Python ideals. I rather
> enjoyed that.  In fact there are some Esperantists here (Bill Harris
> of the Python Tutorial in Esperanto, Erik Max Fancis, Peter
> Hansen (?), Konrad Hinsen);  I wonder if there any vegens here,
> too.
>

Python and Esperanto: Esperanto was invented for being a useful, simple 
language that could be learned by almost any culture. It tried to limit the 
number of expressions for a single idea, making it difficult to express 
things that may not be understood or misunderstood. That is the same with 
Python. English and Perl (TMTOWTDI), and Esperanto and Python.

Personally, the only ideal I agree with in Python is Practicality. It really 
*is* easier, it really *is* useful, and it really *is* debuggable, so why 
would you want to use C++ when you have Python? Go with what works, and avoid 
what doesn't.

> it'd also be cool to see the relative age of new pythonistas -- I suspect
> that they're young, but this is completely unfounded.
>

They'd have to be. I can't seem to find a place to get paid to work in Python 
yet. I can't imagine a guy with 3 kids trying to make a living by programming 
python unless he is the rare guy that has a job in it.

Reminds me of the Perl community at first. They were all young, once. Young 
rebels, challenging the C/awk/sed paradigm. Young rebels, willing to write a 
bit of glue code in a young language developed by a young sysadmin...

Now some of them look like they are advancing in years, and the Perl 
community is almost as mainstream as it gets in programming fads.

Jonathan