Python is readable

[rusi]

On Mar 30, 9:02 pm, Steve Howell <showel... at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Steven, how do you predict which abstractions are going to be useless?
>
> There was a time when imaginary numbers were just little toys that the
> mathematicians played around with in their ivory towers.

A non-science/math analogous question:

When Beethoven wrote his last sonatas and quartets they were called
'the abortions of a German idealist' or less charitably the only music
that a stone-deaf man could possibly write
Likewise, Bach's wrote Art of Fugue was regarded as a merely academic
work that codified his knowledge of fugal writing.

It was many decades after their death that everyone began to regard
these as the greatest pieces of music (maybe 50 for Beethoven, almost
100 for Bach).

However for every one Bach/Beethoven there are 100s of fadists who are
great in one generation and garbage-dumped the next.  The encyclopedia
of music I grew up on regarded Schoenberg et al in the Bach/Beethoven
category. Almost certainly a more recent view would not.

So if I side with Steven/Spolsky I would regard a (future) Bach/
Beethoven as an 'abortion.'
If I side with Nathan I may waste my money and life betting on
serialists/cubists and such fashionable but ephemeral fads.

tl;dr version
The usefulness of uber-abstractions is undecidable in the near
timeframe.