Truth in dating (was: HELP! Must choose language!)

[Erik Max Francis]

Andrew McGregor wrote:

> We (University of Canterbury Physics, at the time) had been using a
> lot of
> Fortran (of course), C and Lisp, with a little Perl and lots of
> shellscripts for glue.  When Java arrived, the general impression was
> that
> it was a cute toy.  That's still basically my impression, it's mostly
> useful for UI work and areas where performance doesn't matter (there's
> lots
> of those, which is why Java is popular).
> 
> I'm just irritated I didn't find Python myself until '01.

Same here (I found Python in early-mid 2000).  I'm an experienced
programmer, but had long wanted a high-level language bridging the gap
between shell scripts and full-blown C or C++ programs.  I had
begrudgingly learned and used Perl to fill that gap, but quite frankly
even while I was using it didn't enjoy it.  (The object orientation in
Perl, ugh.)

I constantly learn new languages, even ones I know I'll never use, to
broaden by knowledge base, and one day picked up _Programming Python_
which I used for light bathroom reading.  Even though I didn't much care
for the book (but as an already experienced programmer it didn't stop
me), it soon became apparent that Python was the language I was looking
for.  My first project was a socket-based bot framework for a
proprietary talker, and my second was a full-blown implementation of a
chess adjudicator.

"That'll do, Python."

-- 
 Erik Max Francis / max at alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
 __ San Jose, CA, USA / 37 20 N 121 53 W / &tSftDotIotE
/  \ The map is not the territory.
\__/ Alfred Korzybski
    ZOE / http://www.alcyone.com/pyos/zoe/
 A simple Python OpenGL rendering engine.