Re: [gentoo-dev] Programming advice wanted?

[Jeff Griffiths]

Dennis Allison wrote:
...
> My point was/is that programming is language independent.  I've
> always liked Michael Griffith's comment about programming: "I always
> use the same programming language no matter what the compiler" or
> something like that. Using a polymorphic, internally consistent,
> object-oriented language like Python is a good framework to learn
> programming. I think Python does a pretty good job of capturing the
> abstractions you need to write simple, conceptually clear programs.
> You don't have to worry about the nits, you can program interactively
> and see what happens, and there's not the huge overhead of type
> mechanisms to drag into every single little program. The language is
> introspective (aka introspective) so programs can learn about their
> own structure.

i agree 100% - python was the first gerneral purpose scripting language
I learned, and has still been by far the best experience.

esr sums it up particularly well in his 'why python'[1] post on the
linux journal:

"My second came a couple of hours into the project, when I noticed
(allowing for pauses needed to look up new features in Programming
Python) I was generating working code nearly as fast as I could type.
When I realized this, I was quite startled. An important measure of
effort in coding is the frequency with which you write something that
doesn't actually match your mental representation of the problem, and
have to backtrack on realizing that what you just typed won't actually
tell the language to do what you're thinking. An important measure of
good language design is how rapidly the percentage of missteps of this
kind falls as you gain experience with the language."

this is from an experienced programmer's point of view, but i think it
reflects well on the general experience people have picking up python -
once you get past the enforced-whitespace-formatting quirk it becomes
very easy to understand what you're doing.

1. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3882

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