Python is readable

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 4:07 PM, Steve Howell <showell30 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Mar 30, 1:20 pm, Chris Angelico <ros... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Totally. That's why we're all still programming in assembly language
>> and doing our own memory management, because we would lose a lot of
>> personal value if programming stopped being so difficult. If it
>> weren't for all these silly new-fangled languages with their automatic
>> garbage collection and higher order function handling, we would all be
>> commanding much higher salaries.
>>
>
> While I don't subscribe to the conspiracy theory that "programmers
> invest in arcane practices to preserve personal value" [paraphrase of
> Nathan], surely you could come up with a better argument than "garbage
> collection."

GC is to programming what running water or a fridge is to a kitchen.
It isn't exactly new, in fact you probably would expect it even in a
fairly old kitchen, but you still wouldn't want to give it up. A
somewhat newer example would be the ability to pass higher-order
objects around - functions, mappings, lists, etc - and the basic
concept that an expression resulting in (or function returning) an
object is identical to a variable containing that object. Not every
language supports that.

> There hasn't been much progress in programming language design in the
> last 20 years.  It's been incremental at best. Nobody's really
> thinking outside the box, as far as I can tell.  Please prove me
> wrong.
>
> It's true that we've moved past assembly language.

Twenty years? That would almost certainly include solid Unicode
support. Anything that dates back to 1992 is unlikely to truly
acknowledge the difference between bytes and characters. That's
probably incremental, but a fairly big increment.

ChrisA