[Chicago] Jython

[Martin Maney]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 09:28:29AM -0700, Feihong Hsu wrote:

> If you went to school for computer science between 1998-ish to
> 2002-ish, then you likely picked up Java as one of your first
> programming languages, as many college CS departments switched from
> Scheme or C/C++ to Java. This effort received a lot of support from
> the textbook industry, who were eager to sell more overpriced
> textbooks.

Yeah, I remember those years... from the outside, where there were
these huge numbers of "Dummies for Java" books on the shelves, even
though I knew no one who used the stuff.  Didn't make any sense to me
at the time.

> When I ate dinner with Guido, he or someone else at the table made
> the observation that all the Python programmers he knew had at one
> time programmed in Perl.

There was a time when I probably would have loved Perl, but I was
working in a Xenix 386 environment at the time and if there was a
working port I never found it.  Really could have used a "better AWK"
which was IIRC part of Perl's self-description at the time...

I've picked up a faint familiarity from having to deal with Perl
scripts occasionally, but I've always disliked its line-noise nature
enough that I've preferred to avoid it as much as possible.  So I
wouldn't list it as something I've "programmed in", unlike C, C++,
Smalltalk, Postscript, IITRAN, Fortran, PHP, Python, SQL, ... oh, and
various assemblers, of course, and whatever other minor ones aren't
coming to mind just now.  The cee and pee ones have had been the most
heavily used...

-- 
Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. SUVs, for example,
would arguably be gross even if they ran on a fuel which would
never run out and generated no pollution. SUVs are gross because
they're the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans
look more masculine.)  -- Paul Graham