"Tiger12506" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > Some people need degrees, most people don't. It all depends on what > they are > capable of understanding.
It also depends what they are doing. Most programmers don't build complex state machines, nor do they build safety critical systems. 90% or more of all programs don't need a degree, but somecthings do need formal training and the language is basically irrelevant. degrees dopnm;t teach languages, they teach the underlying theory. > understanding of what else is out there. Python's standard library > is > 'newbie-friendly'. If you doubt it, try emulating what you can > already do in > python in another language. Actually you an do what you do in Python in practically any general purpose language, it just takes a few more lines of code (OK a lot more lines in some cases) But Pythons library is not newbie friendly, sorry. How does a newbie know when to use pickle v cpickle? or urllib v urllib2? And which of the xml parsers? And as for thev mess that is glob/os/path/shutil? Its not clear to me even after 10 years of using Python which function sits where and why. And what about the confusion over system(), popen(),commands(),spawn(), subprocess() etc. or why is there time and datetime? Sure it makes sense once you've played with Python for a while it makes some sense and you learn the role of history. But for a newbie thats not a friendly scenario ad many other languages are far better organised - Smalltalk being one example! And the C++ standard library is another. Even the Java standard library, much as I dislike Java, is better organised and more consistent! -- Alan Gauld Author of the Learn to Program web site http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
