Magnus Lycka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > John Salerno wrote: > > LOL. As weird as it sounds, that's what I *don't* want to happen with > > C#! I've spent a lot of time with it, and I love it, but I don't want > > Python to take over! :) > > Then it might be better to keep away from Python. It *will* spoil > you. Python is a good team player. It's excellent to use in large > projects where different languages fit better for different parts > of the final system,and it's excellent as a programmers tool even > if all production code is written in C# or whatever. Given a free > choice, you'll probably shift more and more of the code to Python > though,since it's faster to write and easier to maintain that way.
Yes, but I haven't found knowing (and using) Python dampens my enthusiasms for learning new languages. Using a language for real life programming isn't the only reason to learn it, after all. Mozart (==Oz) is a great way to reflect on programming paradigms (and Van Roy's and Hariri's book is the 21st century equivalent of SICP!!!); Ruby offers an interesting perspective of a slightly different ways to do the same things Python is good at; O'Caml is an object (;-) lesson in how not all functional languages are elegant rather than practical; Boo shows how Pythonic syntax might go with static typing and inference; pyrex shows how Pythonic syntax might go with optional static typing to generate quite decent C code; sawzall (http://labs.google.com/papers/sawzall.html) is a great example of a very specialized language; Limbo (http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/papers/limbo.html) has its good moments, and any language designed by Ritchie must be worth looking at for that sole reason; Erlang shows a very different FP language... These are all languages I studied after falling in love with Python -- i.e., in the last 6 years. At 8 languages in 6 years, I meet or exceed the "one new language a year" recommendation of the Pragmatic Programmers, on average -- admittedly, out of these, only sawzall and pyrex are ones I've used "for real", the other ones I've studied but never found real-life occasions to use, but that, too (using IRL about 25% of the languages one learns), is roughly par for the course (I would guess that over my lifetime I've learned about 50 languages and seriously used maybe a dozen of them...). Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list