Python rocks

[Mark Carter]

Well, I know I'm preaching to the converted - but Python rocks.

I've been enchanted by the siren calls of Scheme, Lisp and Forth, but in 
the end, I find Python much easier. I even tried a little bit of Tcl.

To give a bit of context ... I have recently switched from Windows to OS 
X and Linux. I missed MS Money, but couldn't get on with GnuCash. So I 
decided to write my own little home-brew money management program that 
includes things like downloading share price info from Yahoo Finance.

I picked Chicken Scheme for OS X. Things started well, and even the web 
download and regex stuff worked fairly painlessly. I wanted to work with 
dates, and decided that I needed the SRFI-19 library. Chicken has 
"eggs", which you can download and install. The problem is that it 
needed further dependencies. Well, no need to panic just because of 
that; but I found that it ultimately depended on gmp, which turned out a 
pain to compile.

Other languages seem to have neat ideas; like closures or macros in 
Scheme, or ultra-simple syntax like Forth. But what I have generally 
found is that other languages seem to require too much pain for too 
little return. I just seem to be way more productive in Python than in 
any other language.