Python and Flaming Thunder

[Dan Upton]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Dave Parker
<daveparker at flamingthunder.com> wrote:
> >  The "Flaming Thunder" looks promising, but without being free
>  > software, it's unlikely it will create a large developer community,
>  > specially considering both free general purpose and scientific
>  > programming languages.
>
>  Perhaps.  Flaming Thunder is only $19.95 per year for an individual
>  (and even less per individual for site licenses), which is less than
>  the cost of just one book on Python.

Bah, subscription for a programming language?  As far as I'm
concerned, that's reason enough not to bother with it.  Paying a
one-time fee, or even once per upgrade, for a full-featured IDE and
lots of support tools is painful but at least justifiable, whereas
paying a yearly license just to even be able to try something out when
there are so many free, sufficient options... There was an article
on/in Wired not so long ago about the economics of free, and how
there's a huge difference mentally between free and not-free, even if
the practical difference is "free" and "$0.01."  (Also, I assume
hdante meant, at least partly, free as in speech, not free as in
beer.)

As an aside, I clearly haven't written anything in FT, but looking at
your examples I don't know that I would want to--there's something
that feels very unnatural about writing English as code.  It also
somehow seems a bit verbose, while one of the strengths of something
like Python (since that's what you're comparing it to) is rapid
implementation.  Just using your "Set ... to" idiom, rather than a
regular = assignment, makes things much more wordy, without improving
readability.  Some of your other structures are awkward, for instance
"Something is a function doing" Again, more text with arguably no gain
in readability.

Just my two cents, anyway.  I now return you to the resident madman,
who I see has sent 4 or 5 messages while I was typing this one...