When I start a program I want to be finished in the shortest time possible. For that reason I have fallen in love with Python. It able me to have something working in a very short period of time...
Languages on the Shelves
- Python - If possible I will always program in Python. It's fast to develop in, it's clean, easy, powerful, highly extendable, it produces very maintainable code, and is perfectly portable..hell I can even make Java-applets with Jython to be run inside a browser if I want too..
- C - If ypu need speed and efficiency C is always a good choice, right? Wrong, I find 90% of the time Python does the trick. I use C mostly to extend and interact with my Python and Simula programs and only spareingly to remove bottlenecks. Often I find myself coding C just for fun..
- sh/csh - Shell programming is what I did most of my sysadmin scripting with.. Now Python has taken over most of the work, but shell programming is great fun and I still use it for smaller tasks.
- S-Lang - I use JED as an editor for most of my programming. It has S-Lang as an embedded language. It is useful to get JED to do what you want.
- Simula - I have rediscovered Simula recently. It's a fantastic language. I've done initial work on GraphApp bindings - a GUI library, and a Simula-to-Python compiler that is half finished. I later plan to implement a Simula front-end to GCC. Simula hasn't been developed since 1985, and it's starting to show. I plan to make my own 'improved' Simula, so it once again can be useful for 'real' projects.
Languages in the Dust Bin
- C++ - Without C++ the world would be a better place.. I think that making a OO language with C syntax is pure madness.
- Java - Java is OO gone bananas! Everything and the kitchen sink is an object - which makes it really annoying to program in.
- Visual Basic - There are no words to describe this stupidity. Please, do the world a favour and don't use it.
- Perl - It's makes your code ugly, hard to debug, and a pain to maintain. Using Perl is just bad business!
- Ruby - Ruby may seem like a good choice at first, but it suffers from much of the same ugliness as Perl. Ruby offers nothing new, and is a boring and obsolete language.
- Haskell - I got physically sick after ten lines of Haskell, and I even stopped using the functional parts in Python because of it.
Python Documentation
- Official Python Web Site
- Python Library Reference
- Python Reference Manual
- FAQTS - Knowledge Base
- The Vaults of Parnassus: Python Resources
- Python Extension writing
- comp.lang.python - The Python News Group
Python Oddities
- Perl vs. Python by Tom Christiansen
- Python2C
- The Daily Python-URL!
- Python Humour
- The Tim Peters Shrine
- The Pythonlabs Team (Python's Core Developers)
The Zen of Python (by Tim Peters)
- Beautiful is better than ugly.
- Explicit is better than implicit.
- Simple is better than complex.
- Complex is better than complicated.
- Flat is better than nested.
- Sparse is better than dense.
- Readability counts.
- Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
- Although practicality beats purity.
- Errors should never pass silently.
- Unless explicitly silenced.
- In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
- There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
- Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
- Now is better than never.
- Although never is often better than right now.
- If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
- If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
- Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!