Sundries

The sheer volume of different programming languages being used today should be enough to intimidate many novice programmers (such as myself), especially considering that, in practice, one often finds that several languages are used in tandem to accomplish separate parts of a larger task.  This makes me think that the programmers arguing so vociferously for a particular language probably aren't just defending their language and attacking others because they can.  We can put it down to survival instinct.  After all, if someone's comfortable in one language and really dreads the thought of learning a new one -- or if, like the guy in the Duck Punching video, you have to stop using a language you're familiar with because your manager thinks Ruby is the way of the future -- it makes some sense that one would lash out.  None of us wants extra work.  And none of us wants to feel like his/her livelihood is threatened by changing times.

Anyway, I'd been thinking about that.  Goes with the thing from the last post about programmers not being immune to a sort of mythology.  We'll move on to this week's stuff now.

To start: I'm glad this exists.

As for the book-learnin', I'm having a hard time retaining the info from the light-speed overview of these 20ish different languages (and their offshoots) we've looked at in ch. 2.  I fully support Lauren's idea for creating a table to compare the languages, and I'll be more than happy to contribute to it myself.  But honestly, I don't know that this stuff is going to stick in my mind without firsthand experience of each language.  (And even then... we'll see.  There's a lot of stuff!)  The practice with BASIC is certainly helping, at least.

Ian makes a good point about many of the online Java vs. Python resources being one-sided.  I'd think that this could be partly attributed to Java often being used in the workplace for its reliability and huge-ness.  On account of its widespread use, Java doesn't really have to defend itself.  Pythonistas may feel that they have to fight for their language to get its time in the limelight, because it's just not as big a name at this point. Of course, it's also possible that the sorts of people who code in their free time (a group which likely contains most of the people who feel inclined to write blogs about programming) just prefer using Python.  Maybe for readability/writability reasons.  Maybe because they're writing relatively small programs, for which Python is just fine (and sometimes even better suited than Java).  Can't really say for sure why this phenomenon exists.

Except for the fact that Python is just better.

zing