Is Python your only programming language?

[Ben Finney]

On Tue, 12 Aug 2003 05:44:45 GMT, Joe Cheng wrote:
> many [...] have come to the conclusion that Java and Python are highly
> complimentary languages.

I think you mean "complementary"; I've never had a programming language
compliment me on anything, though it'd make a nice change from all those
error messages :-)

> I want to ask you hard-core c.l.p Pythonistas: Do you use Python for
> everything?  (and I'm counting Python + C extensions as just Python)
> Or do you keep another language equally close at hand, and if so, what
> is it?

My professional programming these days is mostly sysadmin tool writing.
Where I used to use 70% shell with 30% perl, these days I do 80% python
with 20% shell.  That probably reflects the ad-hoc, small-scope nature
of the tools I write though.

It also reflects the fact that I intend these tools to be maintainable
by others who don't necessarily know the languages I use inside out.  I
would shudder to show a complex shell or perl script to a cow-orker, but
my Python scripts are easily explainable -- one cow-orker has
volunteered the comment that "it looks like pseudocode" :-)

> And finally, do you foresee a day when Python can be, for all
> practical intents and purposes, your only programming language?

I do have several larger-scale programming projects in the back wings,
and those will be written entirely in Python.  (Waiting has gained me
the incremental nice features of Python 2.3 :-)

-- 
 \     "I know when I'm going to die, because my birth certificate has |
  `\                            an expiration date."  -- Steven Wright |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney <http://bignose.squidly.org/>