I recently listened to: Guido van Rossum: Building an Open Source Project and Community http://cdn.itconversations.com/ITC.SDF-GuidoVanRossum.1-2005.02.17.mp3 http://cdn.itconversations.com/ITC.SDF-GuidoVanRossum.2-2005.02.17.mp3
and I still don't get what's so compelling about Python. Guido made comparisons to Perl only in two areas - saying he likes generators and iterators better than continuations, and essentially saying he prefers the aesthetics of Python over Perl. Supporting the latter he told a tale of a Perl script he used to manage the Python mailing list, which kept breaking, and he felt it was unmaintainable, so he switched to an initially less capable mailing list manager written in Python by a co-worker (which eventually evolved into GNU Mailman). Early in the talk he showed disgust towards a prevalent attitude that Python isn't a real language, and that corporations prefer to use Java and C++ for real applications. Then later he quotes some market research firm that essentially says the same thing, but this time saying that Perl was not maintainable for anything larger than a script, but Python was. To echo that without any qualifiers seems to show an ignorance of modern Perl development. Something he shouldn't have, given his involvement in the scripting language community, which includes attending conferences that cover languages other than Python. He even says he's friends with Larry Wall. What's worse is that when he discusses the internals of the language, he describes things like the way objects were glued-on well after the language was conceived, very unlike Ruby, and very much like Perl. There were several examples of things like this that sounded no better than the warts on Perl, just different. Does a preference for Python just come down to personal taste, without any real objective, technical benefits? If so, I hope the Perl 6 developers have remembered to run the language through a "pretty" filter. :-) Or maybe added a "use Enterprise" pragma that forces all code to be consistently indented in order to avoid a fatal syntax error. :-) -Tom -- Tom Metro Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA "Enterprise solutions through open source." Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/ _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
