A little disappointed so far

[Graham Nicholls]

Jay O'Connor wrote:

> On Mon, 19 May 2003 01:09:26 +0100, Graham Nicholls
> <graham at rockcons.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>>Hi.  This is NOT a troll, I promise ( and I realise that that probably
>>makes it highly likely to be one!)
>>
> 
>>
>>2. Its all just so long winded, especially as a shelltool.  I (really)
>>_hate_ to say it, but perl seems so much easier, and more practical.  I am
>>not a huge fan of perl, because of its inbuilt "obfuscability", but I can
>>quickly get things done, like stripping off the pathname of my program, so
>>argv[0] is progname, not ./progname, or /usr/local/bin/progname.
>>
>>A few things seem very hard - so, should I persevere?  I'm reasonably
>>smart, and have always been attracted to Python (except in that I can't
>>_stand_ Monty Python, and find people who can quote it verbatim extremely
>>annoying
> 
>>;-).  I liked the indentation thing, till it bit me.  I suppose I could
>>try
>>bigger tabstops.  I like the OO. But it just seems too slow, where I
>>picked
>>up perl very quickly.  I get the impression I could do "big stuff" with
>>Python, where I wouldn't with perl (I'd use C or C++).
> 
> 
> Just a few thoughts.  One is that I think you have a fair handle on
> what Python is like.  It's a bit more long winded then Perl, but what
> that leads to is...much better readibility and use in getting things
> done.   What I mean by that last point is that for someone new to
> programming and learning Python, it's pretty easy and usually prety
> obvious.  If you have a strong background already, and know 4,001
> shortcuts, then Python will definately seem long-winded, but if not,
> then Python is a lot easier to pick up then Perl.
> 
> What this means in the long run is that once you know Python, even at
> a very basic level, it's a lot easier to pick up someone else's code
> and unerstand what it's doing.
> 
> Part of that and part of the elgenace you speak of does indeed allow
> you to solve larger problems more easily.  I often think of
> scalability along several axis, some inclued number of users, number
> of transactions, amount of data, etc..but two forms of scalability not
> often thought about are a) scalability of devlelopers: how easy is the
> code to share amongs developers athat they can read, understand, and
> contribute to it and ) scalability of problem: how large and complex a
> problem can be solved
> 
> So I think some of yor comments are valid, but I think they contribute
> to Python's scalability in those two areas over a lot of languages.
> 
> Take care,
> Jay

Interesting points, Jay, thanks.  I must admit that scalability of
developers is not an issue for me - I'm self employed, and generally work
on projects on my own or in very small teams.  Its the only way to get
things working (he says, flying in the face of the evidence from open
source, which frankly astounds me!).

Is there an equivalent of [ -f $filename ] to test for the existence of
filename in Python?  Things like this seem essential for a shell tool
language. 


BTW I like the lack of syntax in Python.  Perl is awful for $ @ % & etc.
But perl6 looks to be addressing some of that.

Thanks again,
Graham

-- 
Graham Nicholls
All round good guy.