My newbie annoyances so far

[John Nagle]

Paul McGuire wrote:
> Python is not VB and Python is not Java and Python is not Ruby and
> Python is not any other language that is not Python.

     As someone who's written in too many programming languages over
a long career, I'm quite pleased with Python as a programming
language.  It's straightforward to write, has few irregularities,
and has good run-time error semantics.

     The weak points in Python are implementation issues.
Sockets, HTTP access, SSL, and database access are all
flakier than they should be for such common capabilities.
The CPython implementation is unreasonably slow compared
to good implementations of other dynamic languages such
as LISP and JavaScript.

     But really, the language is in good shape.  I'd rather
have a faster implementation of Python 2.5 than anything
being proposed as a language change.

				John Nagle

(P.S. PEP 3117 is a joke, right?)