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Holiday Topics

Stefan Tilkov,

One of the things I did during the Christmas holidays, apart from spending much time with my family, was to finally learn Python. Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Python book (highly recommended) provided a great learning resource, and MacPython is a pretty neat environment. My goal was not to learn the language to be able to develop something with it in the near future (in fact, I sadly don’t spend much time programming, these days), but to find out how it compares to other languages, and to gain a deeper understanding about why so many people like it. My personal take: It’s pretty nice, I love the functional aspects (like map/filter/reduce), I don’t care much for the syntax (especially concerning the OO features - I have no problem with using indentation instead of braces). If there were no other restrictions, political, economical, market-wise, etc., I’d still prefer using Lisp or Scheme; as both are not really acceptable in most customer projects, Python might be a good choice. I’ll take a look at Ruby next - people tell me I will like its syntax better. We’ll see.