Re: Scripting language takes a silicon turn

[David Given <dg@...>]

On Tuesday 24 January 2006 10:24, Lisa Parratt wrote:
[...]
> Personally, I'm of the opinion that in real world usage, the white space
> issue is enough to kill the languages utility stone dead, let alone the
> other flaws it and it's creators glaringly contain.

I wrote a biggish app in Python (http://sqmail.sf.net), and for me the 
whitespace issue was simply non-existant --- I indented all my code the way I 
always indented code and it all worked fine.

Python's big win for me was that it has a huge set of comprehensive, useful, 
powerful libraries. SQMail is a MUA that uses a MySQL backend to store all 
its data. I didn't have to write *any* grunt code for dealing with GTK+, 
MySQL, Mime attachment handling, configuration file parsing, etc --- all I 
did was to import the standard libraries, and they worked.

The language itself is pretty decent as dynamic languages go --- it 
fundamentally *gets the job done*, which is the important thing. Back then, I 
thought it was the bee's knees, because I hadn't had much exposure to better 
languages, and these days I suspect it would irritate me too much to use. (I 
should point out that Lua has an equal number of features that irritate me, 
but because Lua's so small and customisable I'm more willing to put up with 
it.) Also, these days I know how useful real closures and coroutines are, 
which I'm not sure Python supported then. (Generators do *not* cut it.)

Python's big killer feature is the library set, which Lua doesn't have. I 
wonder --- might it be possible to build a Lua-to-Python-extension connector 
to allow Python libraries to be used in Lua?

-- 
+- David Given --McQ-+ 
|  dg@cowlark.com    | "The further you are from your server, the more
| (dg@tao-group.com) | likely it is to crash." --- Woodhead's law
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