Searching for the best scripting language,

[Eric S. Johansson]

Richard James wrote:
> Let the rabid "in defense of Python" flames begin!

I will defend python from a different perspective namely that of handicapped usability.  Python doesn't contain a whole lot of "modem line noise" characters and with the help of python mode in emacs, does a lot of the indentation properly.  So all in all, it minimizes hand use which minimizes physical pain.
I suspect that a blind user would also have greater ease using and working with python for the same reason.  modem line noise characters and, funny spelling mixed case are the three biggest impediments to usability by handicapped people.

I would love to have an IDE (to tie into another thread) which would work well with speech recognition.  There is already a project (voice coder) which has built a lot of the infrastructure necessary to do so but it (in my opinion) is hampered by the one-way nature of that integration.  I believe for handicapped accessibility to programming environments to be truly useful there needs to be a two-way integration where the IDE reveals information about the application so that appropriate grammars and symbols will be revealed and made speakable.

---eric