Why learn Python ??

[Michele Simionato]

Samuel Walters <swalters_usenet at yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<pan.2004.01.12.20.18.36.606924 at yahoo.com>...
> Lisp/Scheme:
> Lisp and Scheme are two languages that people claim will give you
> Jedi-like powers as a programmer.  I'm learning them right now, so I can't
> give you advice on why one would learn them.

I can think of two situations:

1. You want to learn more about programming.
2: You want to implement your own programming language.

About 1: Lisp/Scheme are traditionally at the frontier of the research
in programming languages, so they have everything (Common Lisp) or
you can easily implement everything (Scheme). So, when you have learned
Lisp/Scheme, you have learned nearly every concepts in programming.
This is the reason why (IMHO opinion) you should not try to learn them
as first languages, especially Common Lisp. It is too difficult.
Learn Python first!

About 2: if you want to implement a programming language, it is much
easier to write it on top of Lisp/Scheme (thanks to the macro facility) 
than to write it from scratch. Of, course, if you want performance,
you would implement it in C, but still Lisp/Scheme can be useful to
prototype it.

Apart for these two situations, I would stay with Python. Just my 2 eurocents,

   Michele