[Tutor] Two Newbile Questions: porting drawmap.c, & Python as a lifetime language

[dnelson at cae.wisc.edu]

Relying heavily on the "newbies treated well" advertisment... :^)

I'm an old C programmer, which is to say (a) I am old, and (b) even  
when young, I somehow managed to program in "old C".

I have been working--for years--on creating a personal variant of  
drawmap.c, Fred M. Erickson's wonderful  
USGS-maps-to-shaded-relief-or-contour-map-renderer, and I have finally  
hit the wall. I have managed to make things sooo complex that the  
effort to learn a new language no longer seems unaffordable.

I am seeking opinions from seasoned veterans on the following two questions:

1. What's involved in a port of a C program into Python?  (drawmap is  
offered in
    a number of linux distributions btw.)

2. Seeing Python hailed as a good language for learning programming,  
how do you
    rate it as a lifetime language? (I can imagine that many people have
    settled into one language for doing the remainder of their life's work. If
    I am pressed, I will choose Perl at this point.)

Humbly,
--
David