A little disappointed so far

[Bryan]

> > Power is nothing without maintainability.
> Well I reckon I can go back to any peice of shell and read it, even if I
> wrote it 15 years ago.
> >

you, you, you... it's not about you.  it's about the poor sap who doesn't
know perl or python who has to maintain your code when that car runs over
you.  with very little programming experience, said sap would most-likely be
able to read your python code and understand it.  i would wager that odds
are 99.9%  (s)he would not be able to understand your perl script or have an
incredibly hard time with it.  i would bet 100% that not one of those
criptic perl symbols or regular expressions would be understood the first
time one look at your scripts.  the fact that you could read a perl script
that you wrote 15 years ago has absolutely no relevance at all.  in my
opinion, the best programmers are those who program for others to read and
maintain and again, my opinion is that python is the best language for this.
when my coworkers write python code, it looks like i wrote it and it's so
easy to maintain.

also, and i'm really serious about this.  since you have a lot of experience
in perl and from many of your comments, i think you might be more
comfortable with ruby since it's more perlish than python, yet gives you
much of the benifits that python gives you.  they have an excellant
tutorial/manual at their site.  i studied both before i chose python for my
own reasons.  i know others that chose ruby.  i get the feeling that you are
trying to fight the language instead of letting the language work for you.
maybe with ruby it'll be less of a fight for you.

good luck,

bryan