I’ve been using Python for maybe 4 or 5 years now. On the whole, the experience has been very positive: big pluses include the excellent (although rather stylistically disjoint) standard library; built-in collection types and list comprehensions; the experience, at least, of finding that duck typing actually “sort of works”; and the clean syntax. However, the “elegant” indentation-based scoping for which it’s so famous is, all told, a very bad idea, regardless of what die hard Pythonistas may tell you.

Let’s start with a consideration of syntax — the most visceral feature of a language. Syntax is the most immediate feature of a language, and you know right from the start whether or not you like the feel of it. User interfaces appear secretly everywhere, from the symbols chosen to represent particular quantities in algebra to the syntactic sugar aspects of a programming language. Some experienced coders, especially those who know several languages well, may dismiss syntax-worrying as pointless and superficial, but I’m not so sure: a good syntax makes it not only fast to code up common tasks, but it will also emphasise the structure of an algorithm at a glance and be based on a few consistently applied core concepts. This is a lot more than lily gilding. Strictly, I can do anything in any Turing complete language, so the whole point of a good language is that it makes code for its target tasks readable, elegant and extensible: syntax plays a major role here. Python does well from this point of view: you can see right away that this is a language which doesn’t render your own code unreadable when you go for a whole week without reading it. Contrast Lisp or Perl, or PHP: all serious languages suffering from serious syntactic defects (okay, so the most serious is the least heavily used… but that’s got a lot to do with it having the worst syntax).

From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user's conversion to Mac OS X—Part II: Page 2

At one level, you have people who are basically business analysts; they're using Access or Excel or VB6 to write data analyzing/number crunching applications. These things are hugely important in the business world, totally unexciting to anyone else, and the people writing them aren't really "programmers." I mean, they are, in the sense that they're writing programs, but they're not especially interested in programming or anything like that. They don't really care about the quality of the libraries and tools they're using; they just want something simple enough that they can pick it up without too much difficulty. They'll never write the best code or the best programs in the world; they won't be elegant or well-structured or pretty to look at. But they'll work. Historically, as I said, these are the kind of people who Access is made for. Access is a great tool, quite unparalleled. Sure, it's a lousy database engine with a hideous programming language, but the power it gives these people is immense. So Access and VB6 and Excel macros are where it's at for these guys.

At the next level, you have the journeyman developers. Now these people aren't "business" people—they are proper programmers. But it's just a job, and they'll tend to stick with what they know rather than try to do something better. They might be a bit more discerning about their tools than the business types, but they're not going to go out of their way to pick up new skills and learn new things. They might use VB6 or Java or C# or whatever; it doesn't really matter to them, as they'll use whatever offers them the best employment opportunities at any given moment. Their code will probably look more or less the same no matter what. They're not going to learn the idioms of whatever specific language they're using, because there's no need, so it's just not for them.

A key feature of these developers is that, most of the time, they're writing "enterprise" software. This isn't software that will sit on a shelf in a store for someone to buy; it's custom

Tags: .net, windows, apple, osx, vista, programming, lock-in, spleen, developers, microsoft on 2008-05-06 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About