Re: [MLUG] guess what

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, Mike Miller wrote:

> On Wed, 31 Mar 2004, Michael wrote:
> 
> > Don't forget to buy a Python book. Python is the best language out
> > there. Way easier to work in than Perl, C++, or Java.
> 
> Interesting.  I think of Perl, C++ and Java as having very
> different roles in computing.  Where does Python fit in?  Would it
> be more likely to do what Perl has been doing for people?

I'm not a Python expert, but my take is the following:

Python is another scripting language, similar to Perl and Ruby in 
its sphere of application.  Python has a cleaner syntax than Perl, 
but is less suited to writing very short programs.  The difficulty 
is that, despite what its adherants will tell you, it is not *that* 
well designed a language.  The last time I looked at it seriously, 
for example, it had really dorky rules for the scoping of 
variables.  The Python community was also run by people who had a 
huge chip on their shoulder.  That said, I think they would be much 
further up the food chain if they had not also done a major rewrite 
of the whole thing *just* in time to hit the end of the .com era and 
so insure that most (all?) of the books you could buy on it were 
obsolete.  And, for the fourteen billionth time, there is no doubt 
that using white space syntactically was really not that great an 
idea.  

Of the 3 languages, Ruby is, I believe, easily the most interesting.  
It is also, however, the one least likely to succeed in the short 
run due to the tragically bad luck that it is/was the first big open 
source language effort to come out of Japan, which has hurt the 
documentation effort and led to some other oddities about that 
community.

If I had to predict the long term, I'm not sure any of these 3 will
be here 10 or 20 years from now.  Perl6 will pretty clearly never
happen, Ruby hasn't gotten even half as big as Python yet, and
Python could be squished by any other clean-looking scripting
language.  Heck, given the amount of Javascript out there, the next
big version of Javascript coming up probably should not be
underestimated.
 
> Side note:  With the work I do in genetics, we get a lot of Perl
> and a lot of C or C++, sometimes some Pascal (not a good thing but
> a couple of top people happened to use Pascal).  Not much Java or
> Python yet, but it's just a matter of time for Python, I guess.

Another interesting aspect of python is the fact that you can 
compile (at least a subset of it) into something that will run on an 
appropriate jvm.  "Jython" could have, as it were, some legs.

jking

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