On 22/04/2026 23:17, johnnyrebel0801--- via Python-list wrote:
Hi, this is John Quinn and I'm new on this board. I live down in Ottawa,
Illinois.
I'm interested in learning Python so that I can apply it to help in modernizing
mainframe legacy systems. I worked as a PL/1 Applications Programmer at State
Farm Systems for 13 years using IMS Databases and of course JCL on the IBM MVS
Operating System. Then I worked with the same skills at Nielsen Media Research
in Florida for a few years. I have nothing technical to add to these
discussions yet, but hope to in the future. I am retired and in great health
and hoping I can do contract work once I become proficient in Python and the
current various developer tools for editing and testing platforms.
Looking forward to learning Python and it's associated tools.
John Quinn
Hi John, welcome to Python.
I think you will find it is a friendly language, quite easy to learn.
It is written by programmers for programmers.
The online documentation is pretty good. It also has built-in
documentation, more sketchy, but still useful sometimes.
The error messages are very good (and constantly being improved) - great
for debugging.
In my opinion, its lack of boilerplate makes it superb for development
and experimentation.
One feature which you may find takes a little getting used to is that
indentation is syntactically significant,
used to mark nested blocks of code (instead of braces or "BEGIN"/"END"
keywords or whatever).
But most programmers in e.g. C indent their code in that way anyway
for clarity, and even use tools to do it for them.
Best,
Rob Cliffe
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