PYTHON IS CRAP

[François Pinard]

(Also replying to the list.)

[Haniff Din]

> I think you've missed the whole point of the post.

Indeed, I thought you were looking for a random fight, and did not understand
you were serious.

> Why do we need another language like "tcl" "perl" etc..?  Looks like to
> me people just trying to get Phds, and making like for everyone difficult.

Honestly, if TCL and Perl were really satisfactory, this is quite unlikely
that newer languages like Python would receive any acceptance.  (For the
record, Python is not _that_ new, it may be around, maybe ten years.)

Python has _really_ made my life much easier.  I used to program amounts of
code of Perl and C[1] before.  I do not use Perl anymore, and lost a good
part of my interest for C.  I never had the courage to study TCL or Java,
or ASP or PHP, or VB, despite I often heard these are rather popular.

In a word, new successful languages do address real needs, which in the free
world, were deficiencies in other languages.  This is a difficult undertaking
to design a really good language.  And most Phds are plainly forgotten :-).

> I don't have the brain the size of a planet like you, able to absorb
> and understand languages in seconds.

Don't misjudge me.  Every language I learned required a lot of work overall.
Even Python.  Maybe you can get the overall feeling of a language in one
day, and the all essential details in one week, it still takes months to
develop something that resembles a style, and becoming able to segregate
between good and wrong habits.  To really get the beginnings of a deeper
culture, you should count a few years, for _any_ language.

This is why I consider so important to select and learn at least one
language well, than a lot of languages superficially.  Such investments
also explain why people make religions of languages, it is not easy to
take a few years of life, and work and sweat, and throw these overboard.

> I need fast reliable info to get started and fully understand Python in
> under an hour.

You can get started with Python in a few hours, I found it exceptionally
easy.  But there is no totally free meal.  I'm working with Python with
some intensity, for many months now, and even if I feel I begin to have
an idea of it, I'm far from understanding it fully.  It is completely
unrealistic, in my opinion, to expect mastering a language under an hour.
Unless the language is totally uninteresting, of course...

> How am I supposed to keep up with all this web development stuff and
> inform management when they say to me, why aren't using Python isn't
> Perl out of date now?

To keep up with everything with moves on, even superficially, is nearly
impossible.  Some of the current complexity looks gratuitous for me,
it sometimes comes from ignorance, but this kind does not survive for
very long usually.  It more often comes from commercial concerns, where
Microsoft (for example) introduces incompatibilities to kill competition,
and difficulties to give some original value to Microsoft certification :-).

Unless you want to know nothing about everything, you have to choose
and specialise.  Doing this while keeping an eye opened on the rest is a
difficult art.  Let me say that Python is one of my happiest bet, so far.

----------
[1] Before C and Perl and Scheme, I did a lot of Pascal and LISP, and before
that, FORTRAN and COMPASS (both CPU and PPU), and Balm, and Snobol, Cobol,
Algol, APL, and surely a few others that do not pop to my mind (I keep
forgetting what I do).  To some extent, I lost an incredible amount of time.
I sometimes wish I found something like Python when I was younger :-).

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard