Mastering Python

[Aahz]

In article <yxMKh.8126$M65.601 at newssvr21.news.prodigy.net>,
John Nagle  <nagle at animats.com> wrote:
>Alex Martelli wrote:
>> Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>Mastery and quickly are opposing terms <G> Took me 15 years on a job
>>>using FORTRAN 77 and I still wouldn't have called myself a master. (I'm
>>>more of a JoAT)
>> 
>> My favorite "Stars!" PRT, mind you -- but when some language interests
>> me enough, I do tend to "master" it... guess it's correlated with what
>> Brooks saw as the ideal "language lawyer" in his "surgical team"
>> approach, an intrinsic fascination with bunches of interconnected rules.
>
>    Python just isn't that complicated.  The syntax is straightforward,
>and the semantics are similar to most other dynamic object-oriented
>languages.  If you know Perl or Smalltalk or LISP or JavaScript, Python
>does about what you'd expect.

Yes and no.  At the time I learned Python, I was a Perl expert (but not
a master), and I had a bunch of other languages under my belt (including
Fortran, Pascal, C, Ada).  Nevertheless, for the first month of Python,
I found that I kept having problems because I tried to make Python fit
the mold of other languages rather than accepting it on its own terms.

(Admittedly, part of my problem was that I was learning Python under
duress -- I saw no reason to learn Yet Another Scripting Language.)

Then there are all the little odd corners of Python that stand in the
way of true mastery, like what happens with refcounts and exception
tracebacks.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"Typing is cheap.  Thinking is expensive."  --Roy Smith