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I spoke to someone at the help desk/sales department and got nowhere (if the disk is faulty due to a manufacturing defect send it back and we will replace it). Not like I had much of a choice, so I ponied up the money.

Additions to python such as scipy are bring some Matlab like functionality. Defining class objects in Matlab is Ugly Ugly Ugly. In Python creating new classes is so much easier.

The extensions to Python are not as complete as the Matlab toolboxes but python is a far far better programming license. And Python is free.

I'd personally like to suggest trying out Python. Not only is it more powerful than, and just as easy to code as – in fact, often considerably easier than – Visual Basic, it also has the advantage of running on many other operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X. It can take a little while to get the hang of, but once you know what you're doing it's effortless (take a look for yourself at a couple things I hacked together, for example).

And yes, despite being a Linux hacker now I once did use Visual Basic, and I have to say it took way longer to learn VB than it did Python.

Yes, they're contacting the developers.

Isn't that what PERL is all about?

No, that's what python is all about: http://www.python.org/doc/essays/cp4e.html and http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.html?st ream_id=240

Guido (the creator of python) mentions a story about a taxi driver not much unlike what has been already mentioned about an accountant: a non-programmer fits together a small script that glues together high-level components. I call that programming.

Also, RMS says in one of his talks: "anyone of reasonable of intelligence can learn how to program. They may not be able to do hard jobs, but they can learn enough to do easy jobs"

And back in the day, (not too long) before I'd call myself a real programmer, I could still use .bat gotos and javascript document.backgroundColor = chartreuse. Not "real" programming, but in some sense programming none the less.

Let's not underestimate the programming abilities of "non-programmers" (ignoring the contradiction of terms). But let's certainly not overestimate it either!

Quite a few Google employees read slashdot regularly (and even post too!). Especially the "techguys".

It's really not an insidious cabal. Really. Quite a few quite prolific people would bail if the company started doing any thing "evil". There are too many principled idealists that work there that could get a new high-profile job in minutes if the evil factor was kicked up a notch.

I think google should comply and hand it over. Howver they should print it. On paper. With hard to OCR font http://mail.python.org/pipermail/image-sig/2004-Ap ril/002689.html

You've obviously not been paying attention to any of the other posts. So I'll summarise for you:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/OrganizationsUsingPyth on (Games section).

You might want to read the rest of that page too.

Eivind (Perl Must Die!)

I'm afraid it is still true. Lexical scoping has never been properly fixed in Python in relation to closures. See this link for an excellent explanation. Perl does lexical scoping just fine, and I like explicit variable declarations, even in a scripting language.

AppleScript really isn't a particularly great language. My understanding is that any OSA language can use AppleEvents, so all you need is something like this to talk to applications in something you are more used to:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pythonmac-sig/200 1-August/004064.html

I'm unfortunately not too familiar with C#, so I can't comment on it's logging facilities (or lack thereof) other than the .NET EventLog class.

There is a project on Sourceforge called C# Logger that is supposedly similar to log4j in Java. But it seems to be stuck in alpha release mode, and not particularly active.

Just my two cents. Hopefully it helps. :)

10 lines ? too much
better with python in 5

http://www.python.org/doc/1.5.2p2/lib/module-BaseH TTPServer.html

• $variable is a scalar. That's a simple variable like a number or a string. $string = 'hello world';
  
• @variable is an array. @array = (0,1,2,3,4,5);
  
• %variable is a hash, or a keyed array. %hash = (a=>1, b=>2, c=>3);
  
• Scalars require no element access.
  
• Arrays use the [index] nomenclature, borrowed from C.
  
• Hashes use the {key} nomenclature.
  
• There's one quirk to perl 5 to keep in mind - scalar access to a complex data type is sigiled like a scalar. $array[5] or $hash{key}, for instance. Perl 4 and Perl 6 avoid this pedantic use of the sigil and support @array[5] and %hash{key} which is probably more 'human friendly'.
  

• $variable is a scalar. That's a simple variable like a number or a string. $string = 'hello world';
  
• @variable is an array. @array = (0,1,2,3,4,5);
  
• %variable is a hash, or a keyed array. %hash = (a=>1, b=>2, c=>3);
  
• Scalars require no element access.
  
• Arrays use the [index] nomenclature, borrowed from C.
  
• Hashes use the {key} nomenclature.
  
• There's one quirk to perl 5 to keep in mind - scalar access to a complex data type is sigiled like a scalar. $array[5] or $hash{key}, for instance. Perl 4 and Perl 6 avoid this pedantic use of the sigil and support @array[5] and %hash{key} which is probably more 'human friendly'.
  

Google seems to think Python is ok: http://www.python.org/Quotes.html

For PyCon 2006, we have a wiki page containing the master schedule data, and a parsing script to generate an HTML or pickled version of the schedule.

For PyCon 2006, we have a wiki page containing the master schedule data, and a parsing script to generate an HTML or pickled version of the schedule.

Google uses Python. http://www.python.org/Quotes.html

like this one :

http://www.python.org/windows/win32com/ActiveXScri pting.html

You can never be told what Perl is.
You just have to see it for yourself.

Fortunately, I took the red pill years ago.
Unfortunately, the company I work for pratically owns stock in the blue pill.

The mind-bending thing of Haskell's list comprehension is mostly that they're evaluated lazily, and can be of infinite length. A famous examples is of course the implementation of the Fibonacci function in Haskell as an infinite list:

Python's list comprehensions are rather neat, but they lack those features, so they don't come near Haskell's level of mindbendingness. They're mostly a cool shorthand for writing down lists that would have been ugly with map() and filter(). I wish the dict comprehension PEP had made it...

(I'm a Python fan, but nowadays I program Perl for a living and play with the book Practical Common Lisp in my spare time... give Lisp a try!)

No wonder it needed a re-write, its outdated and crufty, compared to more modern scripting languages. Perl has lost its identity, razzle and dazzle from then it was first introduced..

With hacked on OO, CGI that is painful - there is little reason to revisit, because looking at Perl 5, and Perl 6 - they look completely different.

Thank god for new things like this to keep one amused.

My latest web development platform, is Ruby on Rails. I was a sworn Perl, PHP guru until I started using this puppy - its absolutely amazing. Everything else is just too tiring..

Oh my god, let the flame wars begin!

Loaded with syntactic sugar, it has a much wider scope than shell and it is massive overkill.

Here's the complete grammar of Python 2.4, as good a measure of the amount of syntactic sugar as anything. I doubt the grammar of Bourne shell is any smaller. (I seem to recall that there are so many irregularities in shell syntax that it's not even possible to describe it in EBNF, but I might be wrong.)

Python is also conceptually unstable. Constant incompatable upgrades are made.

Such as?

I am probably not the smartest person in the world, and I have no programming experience what so ever. What I am looking for, is some easy language to either script or program. Would python provide a good starting environment? Have any of you been at my level, then learned python?

I was in a similar situation a couple of years ago. As a kid I'd played around with BBC BASIC but hadn't progressed very far and then proceeded to forget most of the little I had learned over the following decade. I eventually stumbled across Python and thought it might be interesting to have a play around and see how easily I could pick it up.

The best place to start is the non-programmers section of the Python site. I found Alan Gauld's free book here particularly useful. He teaches a complete non-programmer to programme using several languages but with the emphasis firmly on Python. The book focuses on learning to programme rather than learning a specific language and is a great place to start. Several of the other tutorials linked from the Python site are also worth a look.

Good luck and I hope you enjoy yourself as much as I did.

The language was actually named that because of Monty Python so that's not far off: http://python.org/doc/faq/general.html#why-is-it-c alled-python

If you want to learn python, skip buying a book and instead read the documentation and tutorials over at the python.org site http://www.python.org/doc/2.4.2/ . I learned Python, Perl, TI Basic, Intercal this way.

Python would be fantastic for you.

1.) Python's pre-cursor was ABC, a language for teaching kids to program.
2.) Guido specifically targets Python this way as a general purpose language for everybody.
(http://www.python.org/doc/essays/cp4e.html)

This means Python devs debate a lot before adding any new feature that may not be completly consistant with the whole design of the language.

I learned Python quite late and would not speak from experience about use as a first language but you may try these tutorials and see if you find them friendly.

http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCSpy/
(Quite Basic, despite that name, it is not *academic*)

http://www.byteofpython.info/
(Another well written one)

I'd probably say that it's because Python is both reference-counted and garbage-collected.

That is, it tracks reference counts for objects and calls __del__ when the last reference to the object goes away. If you don't create object reference cycles in your code, using __del__ for cleanup works great, but if you do, you then have to wait for the next run of the garbage collector to clean up the "lost" objects. The catch is that the garbage collector doesn't automatically reclaim the objects if you have a __del__ method - you have to manually determine the order to reclaim the objects in the cycle using the gc module (see here for more pedantic details).

I suggest:

• How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python, introductory, available both in electronic form (for free) and printed;
• Thinking in Python, advanced, available only in electronic form (for free);
• Python Cookbook, Second Edition, advanced, available only in printed form, but it's a really good book.

Good reading.

I suggest:

• How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python, introductory, available both in electronic form (for free) and printed;
• Thinking in Python, advanced, available only in electronic form (for free);
• Python Cookbook, Second Edition, advanced, available only in printed form, but it's a really good book.

Good reading.

I am probably not the smartest person in the world, and I have no programming experience what so ever. What I am looking for, is some easy language to either script or program. Would python provide a good starting environment?

Absolutely. It's been used quite a bit for teaching purposes already, check out the Education special interest group for more information.

Have any of you been at my level, then learned python?

You won't find many experienced programmers who started out with Python, simply because it's relatively new compared with languages like C and BASIC. Don't get me wrong, it's been around about fifteen years, so it's not some experimental system, but in relation to other languages, it's quite new.

I have also tried to learn several languages by reading some O'Reilly books

It really depends on the type of O'Reilly book you have. The 'Nutshell' books are aimed at programmers who want to pick up another language quickly, beginners should probably have one of the 'Learning' books.

I can't believe so many people bitch about Google not open sourcing 90% of their production software when, for the last 5+ years now, they've been the poster child for what's possible if you use open source.

Honestly, how many times have you had to defend Linux as being production-worthy by saying "Google uses it!"

It's just kind of sad to hear this angry rhetoric when it's quite obvious Google is facing many serious competitive threats in the search area (and elsewhere like email), such that the "secret sauce" of how the searching algorithms, clustering software, file storage, and production environment works are closely monitored by spammers and Microsoft and yet you demand the release of such algorithms for what? So you can run a 10,000-machine cluster at home and have your own search engine?

God you people are so petty and short-sighted. Google endorsed Linux. Google proved what you can do with open source. Google employs the original authors of the Gimp, the author of Python, the author of Subversion... etc etc etc and yet you're all so misguided as to accuse them of not being open source friendly.

Let me know when it supports Postgres and is written in a decent language.

Google was my friend and it can be yours too. Here's some info on Python plugins for Eclipse: http://wiki.python.org/moin/EclipsePythonIntegrati on

...this list of Python Editors?

Quite a lot of them work on OS X, and personally I would recomend eclipse (although I have only used it with Java, so I do not know how well it works with Python).

I think this flaw means that Python cannot really compete with Java or C# on big server systems.

You mean like Google? Oh wait...

It really depends on what you're doing. If your process is I/O bound, Python is just as fast. If your process is CPU bound, and the work you are doing is in pure Python code (i.e. not a Python library implemented in C, such as for text or image processing, which is fast -- remember Python is largely implemented in a compiled language underneath), then it won't matter that there's a GIL because it will be too slow anyway!

If you ARE calling out to external C functionality, you can release the GIL in the C code as long as you aren't mucking with Python objects inside it (e.g. release GIL, do a bunch of calculations, then get GIL and return Python object).

If you are using C objects and just want Python to control it, you can embed Python into C, and then just use a small number of C functions for synchronized object access (mutexes, etc.). Then you can have multiple C threads each with their own Python instance, and the Python code can chug along and just make the calls to the C locking/unlocking before modifying whatever C objects you want. Essentially you just make your own http://docs.python.org/lib/module-Queue.html in C and use that for access. You can also use multiple processes and shared memory. You could probably extend this to Python objects too, by making them "external", basically copying the underlying C implementation code and making a new .so from it except with per-object locks instead of using the GIL.

For what you're worried about, there is a much smaller subset of problems that would be fast enough in Python EXCEPT for the GIL. Usually the interpreter speed is the issue -- there aren't too many situations where running 1/20th the speed of C is too slow but 1/10th is acceptable (due to a second CPU).

Nope. I won't agree to that, for one simple reason -- whitespace has meaning in Python.

A university cannot make a programming language choice that introduces unnecessary barriers to blind students. Python does so. Wow, thanks for that bit of news. I guess I will have to tell the blind guy at work he can't use Python.

WxWidgets?

Good point. I think that Python + wxPython + wxGlade is a very powerful combination for clean, fast and maintainable GUI development.

If you do GUIs I suggest to try these tools: they are simple and powerful (wxPython even contains additional classes that are not present in wxWidgets).

It might be nice to see some of the Guido python style in Google's future software though.

NASA uses Ruby also (and no doubt a few dozen other languages)

see here about NASA Ruby (and Python and Perl and other open source) use and also here for NASA and other companies

Python runs on an amazing number of OS , from embedded ones to mainframe (maybe a couple java can't?). Ruby can run on Windows, Unix/Linux/BSD, OpenVMS, BeOS, amiga. Ruby even runs with threads on MS-DOS.

No one I've met doing serious development is building on python, it's just too error prone.

I don't suppose you've heard of this company before?

There are dozens of others, too. I'll cite this page as a source, though it is by no means comprehensive.

My goals are pretty simple: I want to write applications that have a great look & feel that will primarily be pulling information from the web (think weather & news), play with that information and present it in interesting ways. I'd like those applications to be usable on the Linux and perhaps Mac OS X platforms.


In that case I'd recommend something like python combined with some gui toolkit such as wxpython or pygtk.

...into the guts of the machine


Since you're on some unix-like system, you could do worse than plain C and a few books (C:ARM5 by Harbison & Steel and Advanced Programming in the Unix environment by Stevens spring to mind). Some asm knowledge might be useful too.

As for tools, frameworks etc. there is of course an unending list of those. For an IDE, a like emacs code browser.

There's a list of editors at the python wiki site http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEditors/ but no indication of which ones are actively developed.

A lot of people have already mentioned the PyDev plugin for Eclipse. You may also like to know about TruStudio (another Eclipse-based IDE) which supports Python and PHP amongst other "scripting languages", and perhaps something like Stani's Python Editor. I've got all three, plus a couple of other generic editors like Vim, Notepad++, NewEdit, JEdit, also PythonWin (which comes with ActivePython, but you can get it separately for vanilla Python.org).

This isn't very interesting at all.

You can compile a java-program and run it under Mono.
Eclipse runs under Mono.
See: http://www.go-mono.com/images/ikvm-screenshot.png

As the distinction between Java, .NET and Mono seems to be unclear to a few people, I'll throw in my "humble view":

• Mono supports several langauges, that easily interoperate. Java supports one langugage.
  You can write in support for other languages in Java, like Jython, but this is not the point.
  A compiled function written in Boo can easily be called from C#.
  See: http://www.mono-project.com/Languages
  
  
• Mono has a compiler, VM, and a bunch of classes that are all As Free As They Can Be (tm).
  In addition, Mono has re-implemented a few microsoft-specific classes, that can easily be removed, where there supposedely is an incredibly tiny chance that anyone will care. If you're making Linux-only programs, this will never be an issue for you, and you'll have a very nice and powerful tool for making programs with.
  See: http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_General
  
  
• It's easy to call .dll's and .so's from Mono. For what I know, It's not that easy from Java. I tried calling some dlls a few years ago, and it was a mess. For me, at least, the threshold for calling a function from libsomething.so from Java is a lot higher than from Mono. Especially if you're planning on doing this in a crossplattform way, which Mono has support for. You can call the native .so on Linux and the native .dll on windows, with the same program.
  See: http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/8794
  
  
• Python supposedly runs faster under IronPython (which runs on Mono) than normal python (CPython).
  See: http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/papers/9/
  

Regardless of my list of points above, I hope you'll see that Novell could very well be "reinforcing their commitment to the Java community, while at the same time funding Mono".

It's hard to get excited about any tool based on Ruby because it inherits so much confusing syntax from Perl. To many programmers, Perl code looks like gibberish, and that's part of the reason it's falling out of favor. I'm afraid the same will happen to Ruby, which is too bad since its strict adherence to object-oriented concepts is admirable.

I much prefer Python and Mod_Python for web programming, since its syntax is cleaner closer to plain English.

And I agree; I spoke too brusque.

Guido's talking about run-time interface conformance requirements for 3.0.

If it happens, it could be really cool. Granted, it's not compile-time, but, it might make some projects easier than they are right now.

In my mind LAMP is Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl (I've spent most of the past 5 years working in perl) and i'd argue that Java has a far more complete OM than perl does.

Oh, certainly. Perl's entire object model is a bolted-on hack :)

Python and Ruby, on the other hand, have a much better object model. Everything, including classes, methods and imported modules are objects, and can be treated as such. Java lacks this, but partially makes up for this by suppling a vast number of wrapper objects: classes can be wrapped in the Class object, methods can be wrapped in the Method object; but Java's wrappers are very clumsy in comparison to the real thing.

I'll give you the introspection is needlessly complex and that autoboxing is something of a hack, but I feel interfaces are very useful and perhaps more-so than multiple inheritance. Of course Java was my first real-world experience of OO programming, so i may view it differently just because i'm not very used to working with C++.

Certainly the languages you know affects how you view programming, though multiple inheritance done properly is a superset of interfaces. Anything you can do with interfaces, you can do with multiple inheritance. An interface is, after all, just an abstract class with no variables.

However, to get back to the original point, I felt that java was very flexible in terms of end result. I can think of loads of things i can't do in visual basic without resorting to some nasty hack. OTOH the only thing, that springs to mind, that i've had trouble with in Java was getting a servlet to accept a large (8GB) file encoded in an HTTPS post. Perl had no qualms about it.

Certainly Java is better than VB, and easier to read than Perl. In that, we are in complete agreement :). But Python and Ruby, at least to me, seem significantly better again.

You might also want to check out Nice. It's a language that compiles into JVM bytecode, the same as Java, and can use Java classes (Groovy and Scala are some other interesting JVM-based languages). Nice looks a lot like Java, but boasts some pretty interesting advantages, which are listed on the front page of the website. Multi-methods, value dispatch and anonymous methods are my favourites :)

It has gone open source.

import sys # only needed because I use sys.exit

while True:
  check = "This is my password"
  password = raw_input("What is the password: ")
  if password == check:
    print "Right"
    break
  else:
    print "Wrong!"
sys.exit

L:\Program Files\Python23>RawInputStringExample.py
What is the password: dunno
Wrong!
What is the password: hehehe
Wrong!
What is the password: password
Wrong!
What is the password: This is my password
Right

L:\Program Files\Python23>