Why I love python.

[Michael Scarlett]

Anthony Baxter <anthonybaxter at gmail.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.1584.1092379077.5135.python-list at python.org>...
> On 12 Aug 2004 17:05:34 -0700, Michael Scarlett <bitshadow at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > [ pie decorators ]
> > Am i the only one with a
> > visceral reaction to this thing???
> 
> So did you have a similar reaction on first hitting the indentation for
> blocks? I know I dimly recall thinking that this was very strange and
> horrible (dimly, because it was 1992 or 1993).


one of the first books I read on python was Magnus lie Hetland's
Practical python.
http://hetland.org/writing/practical-python/
in the introduction he had a few quotes.
"A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed floor by people
carrying razors"

"C++: hard to learn and built to stay that way"

"Java is, in many ways, C++"

"And now for something completely different....."

the last was his intro to learning Python. When the trs-80 was out
from radio shack, i used to code in basic on it. I lost interest in
computers and only picked it up a few years ago. I investigated python
and fell in love with the language. It's elegance, its simplicity (at
least for the programmer) and its sheer delight to code in. I don't
work in the IT field, and programming isn't my bread and butter. But
just because its so fun, python brought me back into computers - i've
created a a few websites with python on the back end, manipulated
files and a few other projects for intellectual curiousity and for my
day to day work and home life easier. As a result of learning and
coding in python, I wanted to learn more about it, and so I turned to
C, and am now actively learning it simply to learn how to integrate
and build on pyton. I tolerate C's ugliness because i know the end
result is a labour of love? when I can work with it and python. Silly
maybe, but i'm going on emotion here, not logic. Python is simply fun
to code in, and when its fun your more productive and excited to learn
and tackle new problems cause your not bogged down in remebering  how
the increment(++) operator works for pointers in a particular function
that supposed to dynamically allocate memory. terminating every
statement with a ";" or manipulating fgets to discard the '\n'. yada
yada yada.....
The point is python just works.
someone once said python is runable pseudocode. And it works, and
works good at that. I couldn't agree more. I think and then I code.
simple.

addenum: i've had this article bookmarked for some time because once
you read it, you have to wonder are they talking about python. because
you realise python is there already. for those of you interested to
read it and comment on it:

http://archive.gamespy.com/legacy/articles/devweek_b.shtm

thats my $0.02