Python

I am discovering that I really, really love Python. It has its own problems, sure. Everyone does. And when I interviewed at $ork and they said, do you have one language or OS you like over the rest, they said that the thing that convince them I was the guy is I said, nah, I think they all suck. The trick is to know how each one of them sucks, and not to get stuck in the pitfalls of each language and OS.

Yes, there's a song about this. My god, a propaghandi shirt. That's some old-school shit.

And, being a perl guy and a Solaris guy in the past — I say this because I "grew up with Solaris," and I enjoy writing perl code, and I've written a lot of it professionally, but let me be clear, I absolutely know where the pitfalls of those pieces of software are — I really expected to hate the snake.

But, really, Python is pretty cool. I would say its weakest point is its community. If someone had taken the people who currently maintain perl, or are updating it (e.g., the pugsers, parrotsers, and perl6 people), and were to switch languages out from under them and give them python, holy shit would it be awesome. The problem is, Python seems to be everyone's "first language," whereas perl is so scary looking that it's nobody's first language. People see it and go AAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHH WHAT IS THAT???? and run off to, you know, Delphi or whatever.

So python code is often written with very little respect for scope or grown-up programming standards and pragmatics, despite the language having so much support for it. It's sort of like the opposite of Ruby. Ruby has all these great features and this sugary lovely syntax (although it is kinda wordy), and nobody seems to be using it. Rails? Yawn. Sure, people are using rails. But I don't see Ruby ever doing anything more than rails, and that makes me sad.

If Python continues to attract developers who are skilled, or the developers who are already hacking python start getting better (e.g., we start seeing a few conways or mjd's over in pythonland), we might see "The Next Great Language."

I'm frankly excited just to be using it. Cool shit.