Paul Graham on Python hackers

beliavsky at aol.com beliavsky at aol.com
Fri Aug 6 15:27:14 EDT 2004


Paul Graham's recent book "Hackers & Painters" may be interesting
readers for Python programmers. He likes flexible languages like
Python, although Lisp is his favorite. Here is a quote from his book,
also online at http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html , where he contrasts
Python and Java programmers. He is opinionated :).

"When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're not
just making a technical decision. You're also making a social
decision, and this may be the more important of the two. For example,
if your company wants to write some software, it might seem a prudent
choice to write it in Java. But when you choose a language, you're
also choosing a community. The programmers you'll be able to hire to
work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to
work on a project written in Python. [2] And the quality of your
hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though,
frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell
you something about the relative merits of those languages.

Business types prefer the most popular languages because they view
languages as standards. They don't want to bet the company on Betamax.
The thing about languages, though, is that they're not just standards.
If you have to move bits over a network, by all means use TCP/IP. But
a programming language isn't just a format. A programming language is
a medium of expression."



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