At 19:02 10/05/05 -0400, Daniel Carrera wrote:
Hello,
This might be a strange question to ask on a Haskell list, but I do want to hear your opinions. What do you think of Python?
I think it's benefits are neatly summed up by this comment from Tim Berners-Lee, "Python is a language you can get into on one battery": [[ By the way... Python is cool. I had lamented that it ws a long time since I had a practial hacking environment, and Dan Connolly suggested Python as something you could start quickly but which would scale to a large system. One day, 15 minutes before I had to leave for the airport, I got my laptop back out of my bag, and sucked off the web the python 1.6 system and the python tutorial, and a copy of a small notation3 parser Dan had hacked together. I was happy to find that Python is a language you can get into on one battery! I have been happily hacking ever since. I remember Guido trying to persuade me to use python as I was trying to persuade him to write web software! ]] -- http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2000/10/swap/Overview.html?rev=1.20 I was using Python for much of my work before I came to Haskell. It took me a long time to learn to use Haskell anything like effectively (partly, but not entirely, because I'd been corrupted by years of imperative programming). I now choose Haskell for my work because its greater formality appeals to me for my desired applications, but I still use Python and would probably choose it for the kind of use you propose. To be a "starter language", I think there needs to be some delineation between the simple, obvious concepts of functional programming and the more advanced notions that are needed to build programming frameworks. (cf. my recent posting referring to a comment by Alan Kay and Smalltalk -- http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/2005-May/010020.html). I do think that there's a strong role for functional programming for "non-professional" programmers, but I'm not sure that "raw" Haskell is it. I think the Vital project (http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/vital/) is an interesting take (at the level of function rather than specifically the visual aspects) but (last time I looked) lacks IO capability.) #g ------------ Graham Klyne For email: http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact