Typed Python?

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid>:
| hungjunglu at yahoo.com (Hung Jung Lu) writes:
| > In the early days of pocket calculators, Texas Instruments had all
| > these RPN (reverse Polish notation) models.
|
| I don't think TI ever made any RPN calculators.

Mine was an HP.  It was great, would still use it today if
someone hadn't stolen it.  (So then I bought an inexpensive
slide rule, which has served me pretty well and has evidently
never tempted any thief.)

|> In academia all this is fine and dandy. In business, igonoring
|> user-friendliness means... well, no business. RPN calculators are a
|> good example.
|
| Scientific users still often prefer RPN.  Business users might prefer
| algebraic to RPN, but for that matter they're likely to prefer Cobol
| (or Java or whatever they call it now) over Python.

Or C++.  User-friendliness rules.

Seriously, I heard some years back that Smalltalk was at the time
rather popular for certain kinds of business applications.  Is
Smalltalk "user friendly", or is it the programming equivalent of
reverse polish notation?  Or does it make even sense to evaluate a
programming language based on how far you can get with it in the
first 15 minutes?

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com