Deron Meranda wrote:
Python is one of those things I must learn one day and keep promising
myself I will RSN. However, I can code shell scripts and Perl, and
whenever I have a Q&D job to do, it's so easy to reuse what one knows.
Nothing wrong with using what works. But you do owe it to yourself to
take Python for a drive. It's a very easy and quick language to learn,
primarily because there's very few exceptions or special cases or weird
syntax rules.
Sadly, so many of the languages that I learned when they were "the best"
I've left behind me:
Fortran (I discovered in '91 how much I'd forgotten)
COBOL
cbasic
PL/1 (I discovered in 2001 that I wasn't too rusty, but PL/1 wasn't as
good as it might have been)
Pascal
Assembler (various)
Natural
etc.
Specifically for the Perl guy looking to see what's all the fuss with
Python, you should read the article by Eric Raymond:
http://pythonology.org/success&story=esr
Yeah, I've read that one.
Against Java in particular and Python is that I'm using Regular
Expressions, and unless REs have surfaced in Java since I learned it,
that's an after-market addon, and while I expect Python can do them, I
really don't want to confuse myself with yet another implementation of REs.
Java is a low-level langauage and not very comparable to the so-called
"scripting" languages like Perl, Python, or Ruby.
I quite understand that, but it is more portable than many, fairly easy
to code and much safer to use than C or even C++.
Python does have really nice REs. Probably not quite as powerful as
Perl, but close, and perhaps not as "dense". Python's REa are quite
respectable and pretty easy, especially when combined with many other
Pythonic techniques: http://docs.python.org/lib/module-re.html
Good luck with the PDF thing. BTW, you may still want to look at
ReportLab if you're itching to dive into Python at some point. Unlike
most PDF toolkits, ReportLab is surprisingly high-level and lets you
do some very impressive things quickly with very little code.
I must. Reportlab is one of the toys I downloaded.
--
Cheers
John
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