why isn't python more popular?

[Kenn Barry]

In article <8n7128$h0i$1 at slb7.atl.mindspring.net>,
Aahz Maruch <aahz at netcom.com> wrote:
>In article <16359f71.09c6d5fa at usw-ex0104-031.remarq.com>,
>sp00fd  <sp00fdNOspSPAM at yahoo.com.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>the argument that it's more readable/maintainable doesn't work because
>>there are more people that I work with that have and idea about perl
>>than python.
>
>Unless those people have Perl as their *only* programming language, I
>bet that most of them would find reading *other* people's Python
>programs easier to read than other people's Perl programs, after only
>one day of training in Python.

	Oh goodie, a thread that a Python newbie can usefully
contribute to :-). I've been learning Python for less than a week,
now. I don't know Perl. I'm old school, always did such stuff
with C/awk/shell.

	I'm inclined to disagree about Perl's readability for
novices. When you are familiar with C and awk, Perl is fairly
readable, even if you don't know the language. I am currently
maintaining/rewriting some packages written with some Perl and
some C. Twice now, problems arose in the (original, unmodified)
Perl scripts. In both cases, I was able to find and fix the bugs,
without knowing Perl at all. In one case it was a one-line
correction; in the other, I was able to figure out what the
(uncommented :-) code was supposed to be doing, and wrote a C
program to replace it.

	C and awk programmers, you see, are used to reading code
that looks like line noise :-).

	I'm liking Python a lot, by the way. I tried teaching
myself Perl a year or so ago, and set that project aside. Perl
would look good on my resume', but for the stuff I do it offers
no real advantages over C/awk/shell.

	Python is going down smooth. It _is_ very readable. The
control structures are obvious. Harder, for a C guy, is the data
structures and their syntax, strings vs. lists vs. tuples vs.
dictionaries, but it's not especially hard. Maybe two days of
training instead of one, Aahz? Short days, with long lunch
breaks?

	One thing that impressed me especially, was that Python
includes list processing functions in a way that doesn't make me
beat my head against a wall. I tried to teach myself Lisp many
years ago. It may be better now, but back then Lisp was all CARs
and CDRs and parens extending to infinity, and I couldn't make
head or tail of it. I concluded, in fact, that the only practical
way to learn Lisp, was from someone who already knew it, and I
knew no such person.

	But Python doesn't force you to use lists, it just lets
you use 'em, and the syntax is much cleaner. I ended up using
list processing functions in my 1st Python program (a shell
script of mine that I translated), and it was easy to do and to
understand.

	I think I'm going to stick with this Python language a
while. I like languages that reward me with successes early in
the learning process. It's a little wordier than a shell script
for the same function, but a lot more readable and portable.

						Kayembee