Python is fun (useless social thread) ;-)

[Scott David Daniels]

John Salerno wrote:
When I was pursuing a PhD, I was working on query optimization in
object-oriented databases.  My thesis was that you could actually
do query optimization without breaking encapsulation, and I had
several tricks that I knew how to use to do that.  I needed a
language in the DB that had static typing but no implication of
shared structure (implementation or class).  In my investigation
for the work, I kept seeing references to Python, but (A) the white-
space issue made me think it was silly, and (B) I needed a static
typing for my work.

After graduate school, I returned to one of my hobby projects, a
string search program, that I wanted to update to a more modern
language.  I ported the thing to C, but decided it was time to look
at Python more closely, so I used it to experiment with some of my
state machine building algorithms.  By the end of the project, I
had fallen in love with Python as both a programming language and
a way of expressing algorithms to other programmers (who didn't
necessarily know it was Python I was writing).

--Scott David Daniels
scott.daniels at acm.org