> now. As a matter of fact I use, and love, Python because of Butch's quick > solution to ITA Software's Nine 9's problem, which he did in Python, which > inspired me to learn the language. Butch Landingin was also the initial
I ignored Python for the longest time. It was already widely used when I was playing around with Slackware 3.x and I had to do some very rudimentary editing of Python source for Slackware scripts. It didn't pique my interest at all. For some reason, even though it was heavily hyped and described as completely buzzword-compliant (i.e. scripted,object-oriented,interpreted, etc...) it didn't seem to offer anything novel. It was the statement by Bruce Eckel (a C++ and Java expert and prolific book author) where he said he was "going to use Python for all his future projects" that made me actually investigate the language in depth. I was already using Perl and PHP at this time and was a scripting language convert (I no longer thought of C++ as the hammer for every nail and was actually very very impressed with Perl - this was before I discovered PHP, btw) but decided to chance it anyway. Anyway, after the first few chapters of 'Learning Python', I was an enthusiastic convert and started to realize how much unnecessary suffering Perl made you go through (PHP is still pretty ok to this day). The last straw was when I tried to write a recursive search and replace using Perl (text processing is supposed to be its strength right?) and it took me something like 3 hours to figure out the scoping rules of that infernal !#%!@!@# of a language (pardon my italian). And I had loads of Perl references around (perhaps I should have started out with a beginner's guide, but I would've thought a fairly experienced C++ coder shouldn't have to go through that. I was wrong). Well, I finally figured out what the right way was and to this day, I just have to give the middle finger salute when I see Larry Wall's pic on the net - as in gigil! I feel the same way about Stroustrup and the demented inventor of Emacs/info too... :-) Info, (along with TeX, LaTeX, texinfo and dvi) was something you had to suffer through in the early days of Linux when HTML docs were very hard to find. Just figuring out how to view docs was an adventure back then... the Emacs keybindings are completely alien to someone who's used to CUA and are completely unintuitive. Tip: if you don't want to go with a full-fledged app server like Zope but still want to use Python for generating web pages, try WebWare or SkunkWeb. HTML-embedded Python is tricky because of its whitespace-dependent block-structure but Python's power still make it worth this minor annoyance. Again, the caveat with using Python for server side scripting is that it is not as thread-scalable as Java - but there are always workarounds for that. _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
