[IronPython] Jim Hugunin's web log.

["Martin v. Löwis"]

David Wilson wrote:
> Other random thoughts: my experiences of the Python community versus, 
> eg., the perl community make me believe that Pythonistas are generally 
> more accepting of commercial solutions than their open source weenie 
> perl counterparts (*duck*). 

I don't think this is an accurate description. Instead, Python is not
tied so much in Unix as Perl is (IMO). It is not Python's philosophy
to make all platforms look alike, but rather to expose all features of
a platform to the Python programmer - whether this is /dev/tty on Unix
or the registry on Windows. For features where it makes sense, a common
interface is established; other features are by nature restricted to
a single platform.

As a result of that philosophy, people are often tempted to port Python
to "strange" platforms (be that Mac OS 9, BeOS, VMS, or the JVM). They
then found that Python maintainers where open to changes resulting from
these ports as long no harm was done to Python "proper" (laissez-faire);
this continues to encourage people to experiment with the language, and
with various platforms.

Regards,
Martin