[Chicago] Chicago Python User Group: Thurs. July 13, 2006 7pm.

[Robare, Phil]

Edward Summers wrote on Wednesday, July 12, 2006 1:55 PM:
> Speaking of tools: a friend of mine and I were talking about my  
> predilection towards learning multiple languages and his towards  
> learning one well, and he translated a Chinese saying that amounted to:
>
>	A drawer full of knives, none of them sharp.
>
But for every cliché there is an equal an opposite cliché:

	"When all you have is a hammer everthing looks like a nail."

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My analogy of the good development environment has always been the traditional blacksmith's shop where the walls are filled with a variety of tools for special uses.  Some of them purchased, some inherited and many built for a given job and kept to save the work of recreating them if another job of the same sort comes along.

At one time I thought that if I could learn Fortran well enough I could stay with it forever.  Then I went to grad school and had to build off a base that my professor had built using PL/I.  It was a shock to the system to start thinking in block structured terms when I had been glorying in the anarchy of Fortran IV.

Languages are ways of thinking about ideas for problem expression/solution with computers.  Python is very good at letting us think about many of the currently important ideas.  Someday there will be ideas that cannot be expressed well in it.  But the ideas are what are important.

So bring on Perl 6.  What ideas have been brought into it that were not thought of when Perl 5 came out?  Can we express them easily in Python or is a new PEP needed?  The only timeless language is Lisp where any new idea get parentheses wrapped around it and the lispers point and say "Look, it was in there all along."

Phil