A little disappointed so far

[Jay O'Connor]

On Mon, 19 May 2003 01:09:26 +0100, Graham Nicholls
<graham at rockcons.co.uk> wrote:

>Hi.  This is NOT a troll, I promise ( and I realise that that probably makes
>it highly likely to be one!)
>

>
>2. Its all just so long winded, especially as a shelltool.  I (really)
>_hate_ to say it, but perl seems so much easier, and more practical.  I am
>not a huge fan of perl, because of its inbuilt "obfuscability", but I can
>quickly get things done, like stripping off the pathname of my program, so
>argv[0] is progname, not ./progname, or /usr/local/bin/progname. 
>
>A few things seem very hard - so, should I persevere?  I'm reasonably smart,
>and have always been attracted to Python (except in that I can't _stand_
>Monty Python, and find people who can quote it verbatim extremely annoying

>;-).  I liked the indentation thing, till it bit me.  I suppose I could try
>bigger tabstops.  I like the OO. But it just seems too slow, where I picked
>up perl very quickly.  I get the impression I could do "big stuff" with
>Python, where I wouldn't with perl (I'd use C or C++).


Just a few thoughts.  One is that I think you have a fair handle on
what Python is like.  It's a bit more long winded then Perl, but what
that leads to is...much better readibility and use in getting things
done.   What I mean by that last point is that for someone new to
programming and learning Python, it's pretty easy and usually prety
obvious.  If you have a strong background already, and know 4,001
shortcuts, then Python will definately seem long-winded, but if not,
then Python is a lot easier to pick up then Perl.

What this means in the long run is that once you know Python, even at
a very basic level, it's a lot easier to pick up someone else's code
and unerstand what it's doing.

Part of that and part of the elgenace you speak of does indeed allow
you to solve larger problems more easily.  I often think of
scalability along several axis, some inclued number of users, number
of transactions, amount of data, etc..but two forms of scalability not
often thought about are a) scalability of devlelopers: how easy is the
code to share amongs developers athat they can read, understand, and
contribute to it and ) scalability of problem: how large and complex a
problem can be solved

So I think some of yor comments are valid, but I think they contribute
to Python's scalability in those two areas over a lot of languages.

Take care,
Jay