On 8/7/06, Mahesh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Mahesh
Similar to my story. I have been a 100% Perl professional for 6 years and did not pay much attention to other
agile languages during that time.
Amen, me too! It all started when all the mailing lists starting preferring mailman over majordomo... even Perl ones!
Well, I just got serious as a heart attack about Python because I really needed to go beyond building websites page by page and nothing in Perl was up to the task. So I started with Drupal and Joomla, both PHP products, but really found Plone to be a more scaleable product and Python to be a more sane language than PHP.
Python is good for:
- clean code: just look at the syntactic requirements
- high quality flexible object oriented programming - I really like the approach to controlling objects with things
like __init__ - and if you look at the plone videos, you see how default public accessors can have policies added
to them by writing the accessor method. He also goes over why he opted on a Python CMS over PHP
and even Ruby.- Rapid web app development - Quixote, Django, Turbo Gears, CherryPy and even Plone
- Content mgmt - Plone
- Large scale development - the import mechanism is very clean and concise compared to Perl's ExtUtils::MakeMaker. The regularity of code is ensured regardless of chosen editor.
- The C++ crowd loves to script their code with Python.
- google uses Python heavily
- TwistedMatrix is a powerful generic server appliance
- the community does not have nearly as much elitism as I found in the Perl world.
The only difficult thing about Python is that the community discussions and source repositories are highly, highly distributed. In Perl, you have CPAN and Perlmonks.org and maybe a few mailing lists. It was very easy to keep on top of all new Perl developments on a daily basis. With Python, people all keep their source at their repo. Or you have to go through a lot of places like Codezoo, Sourceforge, and others.
But Perl has basically run out of steam. Perl 5 was a great language for mixing C and Shell concepts. But Perl has lost control of the webapp space, and for object-oriented programming, the approach is far more manual, especially in the area of creating getters and setters (the leading product for this in Perl is Class::Accessor - just look at how difficult it is to use). Perl 6 is a cryptic imitation of Python and Ruby that will not appeal to Perl 5 fans or anyone seeking a simple easy to use language. And industry will be squeamish over a completely new codebase and a language that looks and has semantics quite different from Perl 5.
I started with "Think Like a Computer Scientist" but it has typos and the author never got back to me when
I emailed him about them. I think in retrospect, just reading the Tutorial and Library Reference at python.org
is all you need. Then some articles like "Functional Programming in Python"
http://www.amk.ca/python/writing/functional
are good from there.
And be sure to read comp.lang.python every day - lots of good Q/A there. And I though ASPN Python Cookbook was a good resource, but the programs are quite buggy based on IRC #python discussions.
Hi All,
Hi Mahesh
To start with, please forgive me if this question is already answered.
I am totally new to Python. I heard about Python some 3 years back,
but did not give importance to it.
Similar to my story. I have been a 100% Perl professional for 6 years and did not pay much attention to other
agile languages during that time.
I am hearing a lot about Python
again recently.
Amen, me too! It all started when all the mailing lists starting preferring mailman over majordomo... even Perl ones!
I was wondering what Python is good for and how will
it help me, since I am already comfortable with C.
Well, I just got serious as a heart attack about Python because I really needed to go beyond building websites page by page and nothing in Perl was up to the task. So I started with Drupal and Joomla, both PHP products, but really found Plone to be a more scaleable product and Python to be a more sane language than PHP.
Could someone tell me how Python is useful and why is it a good
language to learn apart from C.
Python is good for:
- clean code: just look at the syntactic requirements
- high quality flexible object oriented programming - I really like the approach to controlling objects with things
like __init__ - and if you look at the plone videos, you see how default public accessors can have policies added
to them by writing the accessor method. He also goes over why he opted on a Python CMS over PHP
and even Ruby.
- Content mgmt - Plone
- Large scale development - the import mechanism is very clean and concise compared to Perl's ExtUtils::MakeMaker. The regularity of code is ensured regardless of chosen editor.
- The C++ crowd loves to script their code with Python.
- google uses Python heavily
- TwistedMatrix is a powerful generic server appliance
- the community does not have nearly as much elitism as I found in the Perl world.
The only difficult thing about Python is that the community discussions and source repositories are highly, highly distributed. In Perl, you have CPAN and Perlmonks.org and maybe a few mailing lists. It was very easy to keep on top of all new Perl developments on a daily basis. With Python, people all keep their source at their repo. Or you have to go through a lot of places like Codezoo, Sourceforge, and others.
But Perl has basically run out of steam. Perl 5 was a great language for mixing C and Shell concepts. But Perl has lost control of the webapp space, and for object-oriented programming, the approach is far more manual, especially in the area of creating getters and setters (the leading product for this in Perl is Class::Accessor - just look at how difficult it is to use). Perl 6 is a cryptic imitation of Python and Ruby that will not appeal to Perl 5 fans or anyone seeking a simple easy to use language. And industry will be squeamish over a completely new codebase and a language that looks and has semantics quite different from Perl 5.
Also please point me to a good
starting point for learning Python.
I started with "Think Like a Computer Scientist" but it has typos and the author never got back to me when
I emailed him about them. I think in retrospect, just reading the Tutorial and Library Reference at python.org
is all you need. Then some articles like "Functional Programming in Python"
http://www.amk.ca/python/writing/functional
are good from there.
And be sure to read comp.lang.python every day - lots of good Q/A there. And I though ASPN Python Cookbook was a good resource, but the programs are quite buggy based on IRC #python discussions.
Thanks
Mahesh
_______________________________________________
Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
_______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
