Open Mind?
Python is definitely good, in the days before I knew of Python's existence I used the UNIX utilities but the down side of this was that I needed a *I*X box or cygwin(never used). Python came along and changed everything. I thought Python was the solution to all my problems, cross platform support and only your imagination could limit what you do with it.
I guess that was taking a step in the wrong direction. Restricting oneself to one language IMHO is suicidal. How ever I think most people in Sri Lanka are quite happy knowing just one language either Java or one of the .NET possibilities. Working in the fringes of software development has given me the opportunity to play around with a lot of different things (shell scripts, Awk and sed) out of necessity rather than desire.
What I have realized now is that although Python is really neat and offers most things imaginable its definitely not the best for everything. Therefore now, my personal belief is that there is no best language for everything and furthermore your language choice would be determined by factors such as how fast you need it, level of skill, code maintainability, speed, and maybe platform (to a lesser degree now) .
How fast you need it and the level of skill are related I guess, and in most cases code maintainability is not a factor for sudden ad-hoc scripts.
But then again there is the possibility of becoming a Jack of most languages and a master of none.
I guess that was taking a step in the wrong direction. Restricting oneself to one language IMHO is suicidal. How ever I think most people in Sri Lanka are quite happy knowing just one language either Java or one of the .NET possibilities. Working in the fringes of software development has given me the opportunity to play around with a lot of different things (shell scripts, Awk and sed) out of necessity rather than desire.
What I have realized now is that although Python is really neat and offers most things imaginable its definitely not the best for everything. Therefore now, my personal belief is that there is no best language for everything and furthermore your language choice would be determined by factors such as how fast you need it, level of skill, code maintainability, speed, and maybe platform (to a lesser degree now) .
How fast you need it and the level of skill are related I guess, and in most cases code maintainability is not a factor for sudden ad-hoc scripts.
But then again there is the possibility of becoming a Jack of most languages and a master of none.
3 Comments:
At 8:58 AM,
Anonymous said…
That is something that I’ve been telling my people all along. Well done ed, in figuring it out.
At 7:41 PM,
longdeparted said…
You have no idea how many times those supposed "ad hoc" scripts suddenly get pushed into production, usually by someone who should know better, but thinks they're being a clever manager.
While I completely agree with you, I also think that there are different languages that have different strengths, and simply learning several languages in one class doesn't really help you become more productive quickly.
For instance, I only learnt PHP because I had to do some "urgent" work on a webserver that didn't have Perl installed. I would have never learnt it otherwise, because Perl can do everything PHP can do, and a bit more. I learnt Python because my final year project needed a quickly hacked together GUI and Perl/Tk didn't have the controls that I needed, so I had to learn Python to be able to use wxPython ...
You get the idea ;)
At 11:21 AM,
88Pro said…
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/loty/On the other hand learning different language from different classes helps you think differently. eg. Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, Clean, OCaml.
When I only knew Pascal and came across Delphi, I was totally convinced that Delphi was the answer for every programming problem :-) I even had this in my email signature,
TVisualBasic = class(None)
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