Python Productivity Gain?

[Robin Munn]

Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
> Harry George wrote in a thought-provoking post:
>> 
>> Of course, even in the natural history phase pioneers and advance
>> scouts are capable of detecting an easier pass through the mountains
>> of comlexity.  If 20 people from varied background, each of whom has
>> worked in several languages, tell me that Python is a really great
>> language, then I'll take that as a significant data point.  Especially
>> if they are dumping their previously favorite languages (as varied as
>> COBOL, Perl, Java, C++, VB, Modula-3, Lisp, Prolog) to focus on
>> Python.
>
> My background is (roughly in order) APL, FORTRAN, BASIC, Assembly, C, 
> university :-), Pascal, C++, Object Pascal, Java, LabVIEW, and Python 
> (with a dozen others I forget) and I'm telling you Python is a really
> great language.  I've also dumped my previously favourite languages
> (to wit, BASIC, C, C++, Delphi, and Java) to focus on Python.
>
> Now all you need are 19 others and we'll have a significant data point.
> (Signifying what?  That's what I want to know. ;-)

I would say "Signifying nothing", but that would mean that all this is
"a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury," if you believe the
Bard. I don't feel furious, and I don't think I'm an idiot, so never
mind. (Although if you have other opinions on the latter subject, feel
free *not* to let me know.) <very big grin>

Anyway -- I started with BASIC at age six. Learned Pascal and C on my
own. Also learned C++, but never really grokked object-oriented
programming until much later in my programmer's development. Next came
assembler, which on register-starved Intel hardware was way more
complicated than it really needed to be. In college I was exposed to
Java and Lisp, but never did much with them beyond that one class,
because I had discovered Perl! Here was a language with arrays that
automatically re-sized themselves to fit the amount of data you put in
them -- bliss! And built-in hash table data types were pretty cool too;
they made several different algorithms a lot easier to code up. I also
discovered PHP, which I also thought was very cool.

Then I got out of college and started using these languages every day,
for a living. I still liked Perl, but it was beginning to get a bit hard
for me to read my own code six months later. Not that I was writing
"write-only" code, but the multiplicity of $ and @ symbols mixed in with
my code was actually distracting me from the code's meaning. I found I
was having to devote part of my brainpower to parsing the syntax, and
that was slowing me down. And then a co-worked introduced me to Python.
I was weirded out by the "indentation thing" at first, but quickly
learned to like not having to look for braces. And Python just "felt"
clean. I can't explain it very well, but Python's syntax just never got
in the way of my reading, which left me free to concentrate all my
attention on what the code was actually doing. I dumped my previously
favorite language, Perl, in favor of Python and haven't looked back
since.

-- 
Robin Munn
rmunn at pobox.com