(slightly OT): Python and linux - very cool

[Donovan Rebbechi]

In article <ad496f8.0208020154.c39852e at posting.google.com>, Ville Vainio wrote:
> TuxTrax at fortress.tuxnet.net (TuxTrax) wrote in message news:<slrnakjms5.ocs.TuxTrax at fortress.tuxnet>...
> 
>> I'm giddy with delight. Python is free. FREE! And it beats VB
>> senseless! (IMHO)
> 
> Good for you. Expect your cheerful mood to continue - Python beats
> most other languages senseless, too 

I don't think that's really accurate. There are a lot of languages, that make 
different design choices, and have fundamentally different strengths/weaknesses
to python. Python is a sort of best-of-breed though, IMO.

> (I'm not sure about various
> functional programming languages - they can be very elegant, but seem
> to be quite impractical for many problems, and hard to grok). After a

One thing I like about Python is that it supports useful functional programming
constructs: lambda functions, map, reduce, etc. 

> while of doing things the Python way, doing the same things in other
> languages feels like a real drag. There's very little "grunt work"
> that makes people opt for software architect/whatever role instead of
> a "normal" programmer. There's a very short time between
> understand-how-it-should-work and a working implementation, which
> makes it ideal for impatient people (which probably applies for 90% of
> programmers :)

This is very useful for some things -- for example, the new programmer really
shouldn't have to fight with a compiler. Likewise, people who use programming
languages as tools, rather than tools to develop tools will probably want 
something like this.

On the other hand, serious infrastructure development tends to require 
scalable statically typed programming tools, such as C,C++, Eiffel, and Java.

-- 
Donovan