[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I've already admitted that this was both a poor choice of words and, as > pointed out by Carl, an ad hominem argument. However, if you read the > whole thing you'll see that I'm really railing against the silly "It > fits your brain" and "Only one way to do things" marketing hype, and > programmers who seem to swallow and repeat it, not programmers in > general, nor even python programmers in general.
Yes, but these are community symbols or tribe marks. They don't have much meaning per se, just like the language name or a corporate identity. However they express an attitude ( being easy and free from language design redundancy ) that can be measured at least subjectively by the user. If Ruby "fits the brain" better, then people will simply drop Python in future or right now. There is nothing deep about it. I'm not precisely sure when programming languages have turned into pop culture and language designers stopped to name them "Algol", "Scheme" or "A Programming Language" but "Joy", "Perl" or "Java". Even the small lambda symbol is a pop fetish nowadays that is printed on the T-shirts of Haskellians. Obviously language communities need some emotional glue to grow even when they are constituted mainly by CS PhDs. I don't find this necessarily a bad thing. In case of Lisp I don't think Paul Graham made a bad job in constructing the imagery of a libertarian macho hacker with a high end tool. Meanwhile all the flies are sitting on Blubb that means on a heap of shit. A bit archaic and more cowboy than Michelangelo but even Hegel is more famous for ending history, over 150 years before F. Fukuyama repeated this act, then for his intricate systems theory created by idealist speculation. Some things end as pop cult while others fill the archives of university libraries. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
