On Sun, 26 Jul 2009 14:31:06 +0100, Raffael Cavallaro
<raffaelcavall...@pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote:
On 2009-07-26 09:16:39 -0400, a...@pythoncraft.com (Aahz) said:
There are plenty of expert C++
programmers who switched to Python;
"plenty" is an absolute term, not a relative term. I sincerely doubt
that the majority of python users were formerly *expert* C++ programmers.
Nitpicking like this doesn't help your case.
your thesis only applies to the
legions of people who found it difficult to learn C++ in the first
place.
No, my thesis applies to the overwhelming majority of programmers who
found it more difficult to *master* (i.e., not merely use) C++ as
opposed to mastering python. BTW, this is a *complement* not a dis;
python is a better language than C++ precisely because it is more
sensibly and elegantly designed than C++ and therefore easier to master.
It is perhaps more accurate to say that Python was designed where C++
aggregated. C was fundamentally the wrong place to have started from,
making C++ (as distinct from the subset of C++ that is really C) harder
to learn, never mind master, than it really needed to be.
php represents the same process but farther down the ladder, as it were.
There's often a tradeoff between ease of mastery and power. python hits
a sweet spot for many tasks and many programmers, especially as compared
to C++ (or even lisp, which though more powerful than python is more
difficult to master. lisp beats C++ on both counts imho - more powerful
*and* easier to master). php hits a sweet spot only in a very restricted
domain. Beyond that, it is clearly inferior to python which has greater
power, but is more difficult to master.
Fundamentally incorrect. PHP attracted many people because of where it
lives in the web application structure -- the part of the language that
was thought about very hard. Beyond that there's nothing much to master,
so the whole ease vs power debate is rather pointless.
--
Rhodri James *-* Wildebeest Herder to the Masses
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
