Why do I now love Python? Today's lesson.

[Kirk Strauser]

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I work with a small web hosting company that uses PHP extensively for their
clients' sites.  Today, I was helping their sysadmin upgrade applications on
their main webserver, and that included changing from PHP-4.2.3 to
PHP-4.3.0.

With little fanfare, we discovered, the PHP team had decided to yank support
for the credit card processing module that my colleague's clients depend
on.  The module was still working correctly and was currently maintained,
but someone decided that the processing service (Cybercash) was no longer
available and that support for it was therefore obsolete.  They were wrong.

Now, I'm spending my evening trying like all get-out to get the accursed
module into the newer version of PHP so that paying clients can start
processing orders again - until then, they're losing money.

What does this have to do with Python?  Maybe not a whole lot, except that:

  1) Python is readily extensible - you don't have to compile modules into
     the python executable to use them.

  2) Python isn't PHP.  I just wrote my first Python program yesterday, and
     it's the exact opposite of everything I hate about PHP (haven't those
     people ever heard of namespaces?!?).

  3) If I didn't vent to someone, soon, I was going to explode.  Most of the
     people here are programmers; even if they haven't hit this *exact*
     problem, they've probably seen ones like it.

Thanks, Python community, for making a language that I *like* to look at,
and that I look forward to using to relax after this debacle is over.
- -- 
Kirk Strauser
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