Why isn't Python king of the hill?

[Greg Ewing]

Bruce Sass wrote:
> 
> What is a "host scripting language"?

I think he meant that Python is designed for writing
programs which run directly on the host OS, whereas
most of Java's popularity seems to stem from its
use as a web-server-applet language.

> Compare:
> 
>         cat name.pt{1a,2a,3b} > name    vs. ???

But when the task requires any computation even
slightly less trivial than iterating over a list
of file names, I find it much easier to remember
how to *do* it in Python than to figure out the
necessary sh or csh contortions. So nowadays,
I tend to write any script of more than one
line in Python, even if the Python version is 
somewhat longer.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, University of Canterbury,	  
Christchurch, New Zealand
To get my email address, please visit my web page:	  
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg