[python-advocacy] Why another language?

[Noah Gift]

Hi,

I think this might be my first post to the advocacy list, but I though  
I would share an interesting story.  Jeremy Jones and I are in the  
last couple weeks of finishing, "Python for Unix and Linux Systems  
Administration", and we both feel like it could make a major ripple in  
that space.  Our hope, honestly, is to displace to some degree, the  
notion that Bash and Perl are the only languages for Systems  
Administration.  In fact, although even a few Python programmers might  
disagree, I would argue that only a few lines of Bash is the most you  
should write, as Python is just a better language period.  My personal  
reason for believing this is that even Bash can get out of control,  
and a 50 line Bash script has a habit of turning into two thousand  
lines of unreadable and untestable code.  I figure if you always  
follow the same philosophy with all of the code you write, then you  
will always have readable and testable code, thus the emphasis on  
avoiding even a language like Bash, unless you absolutely have to for  
portability reasons.

Last night I attended an Open Solaris User Group meeting to do some  
research on the use of Python by Solaris Sysadmins and developers, and  
was quite shocked.  Apparently I have been living in an ivory tower of  
Python Utopia, as I was quite shocked to find out that no one there  
used Python, or even tried to that I was aware of.  In addition, when  
I mentioned I was there for research for a book, one highly  
experienced Sun Engineer mentioned, "I hope you mention why people  
need to learn another language like Python".  This caught me off guard  
a bit, as I thought the benefits of Python were known to all.  He did  
bring up a good point though, and I thought it would be a great  
question to pose to the list.  If someone has been programming in C,  
Bash and Perl for years, how can you really make a persuasive argument  
they also need to learn Python.  I suppose I would argue that once you  
program in Python, you won't ever want to use another language again,  
but that is my personal bias.  What is our, or "the", answer for  
someone that poses a very reasonable question like this?


Noah Gift / http://noahgift.com