From kde-core-devel  Tue Jun 14 04:08:51 2005
From: Henry Miller <hank () millerfarm ! com>
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 04:08:51 +0000
To: kde-core-devel
Subject: Re: Build system for KDE4
Message-Id: <200506132308.51854.hank () millerfarm ! com>
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=111872813530497

On Monday 13 June 2005 10:50 pm, David Johnson wrote:
> On Monday 13 June 2005 08:11 pm, Cristian Tibirna wrote:
> > Most new Unix developers know neither. (I speak from experience that
> > I remember -- vaguely, it's true -- from 10-12 years ago.) Yet,
> > python can be learned in _hours_. Make and sh, I _still_ learn them
> > after 10 years (especially make).
>
> Wow. I would have said the exact opposite. Can one really learn Python
> in hours? Then why are all the Python books so large? I can easily
> imagine learning the rudiments of Python in a few hours, but knowing
> enough so that you're not embarassed to put it on your resume would
> take significantly longer. At least to me.

Yes you can!    The books are so large because python has a large and useful 
set of libraries that you can use.   To use any one is a matter of reading 
the introduction and one page of methods, and then using it - everything 
works the way you would expect after just a few hours.   

The biggest advantage of python is you have to work hard to create something 
that can't be read easily.   In fact odds are you can read and understand the 
average python script today, without any of the python books!    You might 
need the book to make changes, but you can understand what it is doing 
without any help.  (This applies because you are a programmer, and thus I 
assume you know how a programmer would think)
 
> Perhaps at 43 I've simply become too old for this community and need to
> move on.

Perhaps at 43 it is time to prove you are not an old dog (I hope 43 isn't old, 
only 12 years away - with no idea where the time went in getting this far I 
can't count 43 as far away) and learn a new trick.   Python is easy.   It 
took me only a short time to love it.  

Of course python is just a tool.   It is great for many tasks, but when speed 
counts I drop back to C++.   Most of the time speed doesn't count as much as 
you think though.