Oh Python..

Posted by mkhairul - April 9, 2009 at 12:04:10 pm - No Comments

Categories: rants

Last night I went to meet with a friend. Just hanging out while he talks about the problem he’s facing leading a team of 9 developers (most of them are junior). Then he asks, “Whats the next big language?”, I did not take the time to ponder or anything because I already the answer if someone ask me, “Python”.

Today I read a post about Why Reddit Uses Python. I agree with Steve and that’s why I think Python will probably shine brighter in the next few years. Hopefully it would be adopted as fast as PHP. There’s an interesting comment which try to clarify what python users meant by ‘readable’.

What you guys are saying is that Java and C# are more readable because of static typing right? As being more verbose make your code easier to read, like knowing when a block start/ends and that a comand ends when a ; happens?

This is because when you are reading code you looking for what the mechanics of the language are doing, and not what pythonistas mean when they say readable that is knowing what the program is meant to do in a more broad sense (not only pythonistas but most of the smalltalk/python/ruby crowd mean). The diference is between knowing what words are in a text and what the text mean.

We don’t care if variable “x” is an int, but that it is being used to index another object in the line “my_dict[x]“. Maybe this difference in what we want from code is because usually when you have at least an small amount of unittests for a program (or some deep knoledge of its workings) when you are fixing a bug you are looking for an error in logic not in the details (not that you are not going to have this other kind of error in a python program, just that they are much less frequent).

After reading Zed’s post, One Laptop Battery Later And I’m A Django Fan, I was eager to return to Python to code stuffs but I was tied down with all the work in PHP. And my cats (still 6-7 months old) needs attention before they turn in adult cat that would not be as playful and ignore me whenever I return home.

I still use python to write scripts to automate stuffs but not as heavy as I used to when I wrote a p2p app just to see that I can and a PIM (Personal Information Manager) with arabic calendar and stuffs using wxPython as its GUI (I really wanted to use Qt but back then I use windows for development and it has license and stuffs).

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