Could Python supplant Java?

[Donal K. Fellows]

Victor Wagner wrote:
> Dan Johnson wrote:
[I think this attribution is correct]
>> What is so developer-hostile about Windows?
> 
> "Friendly" interface. To be a "friendly" is to consider oneself equal
> with his friends. If you want your friend to do something for you,
> you ASK him, not ORDER him.
[...]

"Friendly" interfaces are interfaces that let users do things in the order they
want to, and they drive everything from the users' viewpoint.  Leaving that
critical field blank because the person who knows the information is off on
vacation?  That's a friendly thing to do.  Explaining that you can't save the
information because some fool that shares the computer with you has decided to
share MPEGs from the machine?  That's a friendly thing to do.  Both are hard to
program.

Let's face it, even with the help of a top-notch GUI toolkit, writing a good GUI
is hard.  And playing well in the Windows world demands a GUI (by culture, even
if for no better reason.)  That's why developing for Windows is hard.  (A vast,
baroque API with only mediocre documentation doesn't help, but that's not a
problem limited to Windows.)

Give me a nice clean protocol (where any deviation allows me to say "go away, I
don't want to talk to you") any day.  So much easier to implement!

Donal.
-- 
Donal K. Fellows   http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~fellowsd/   donal.fellows at man.ac.uk
-- Of course, she was referring not to the current but to a past chair, unless
   Babbage is very, very old, *and* tied to a chair in Hawking's basement.
   Which, admittedly, would be pretty cool.                   -- Chris Hammock