Paul Graham on Python hackers

[DilbertFan]

As a whole, this is my favorite book of the last two years, and I read a
lot.  There hasn't yet been a chapter that I started to glaze over, most
other book there is always a point where my hand started to turn the pages
faster.
Really good stuff
<beliavsky at aol.com> wrote in message
news:3064b51d.0408061127.32536826 at posting.google.com...
> 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."