As Simple As Possible?

[sjdevnull at yahoo.com]

Jorgen Grahn wrote:
> More importantly, I think: it's not polite for a programming language to
> make it hard to communicate with the rest of your environment.
>
> Java pissed me off when I looked at it back in the 1990s, because I was on
> Unix, and the language would barely give me access to the command line
> options, had no getopt-style parser, etc. "No, you're supposed to write the
> kinds of programs that /we/ want you to write!"
>
> Python, in contrast, happily provides all that (and enough, it seems, to
> make Windows and web server people reasonably happy too). The ideological
> stuff ends at the source code level.


I always phrased it as "Java is platform independent; Python is
platform agnostic".  The failure of Java to provide access to even such
simple niceties as select() (which is available on all major platforms
in some form) because it doesn't fit the Java Way (TM) was pretty
frustrating (they've fixed that example since, but analagous facilities
are still lacking).

Despite reject TMTOOTDI, Python doesn't have any interest in mandating
a Pure Python solution done using one true philosophy of software
design.