turncoat

[Paul Makepeace]

On 8/22/07, Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:
> On 22 Aug 2007, at 13:20, Steve Mynott wrote:
> [...]
> > Also it takes no more than an hour or two for a Perl programmer
> > to become highly productive in Python.
>
> Umm, bollocks. It'll take longer than that to overcome the culture
> shock.
>
> You and your editor have to get over the significant whitespace, then

..which presumably should take no more than about 10s.

Some people make such a big deal about this when there really is no
deal to be made. There are just fewer characters to type and look at.
Decent programmers aren't spending their time dreaming up creative
(inconsistent) indentation schemes, they're sticking to a consistent
style guide, so 99+% of the time you don't need the punctuation.

> you have to grip the basics of the language, then there's the
> inhalation of the first few chapters of the library documentation to
> get a feel for the capabilities of the basic datatypes.

While I'd say an hour or two is probably on the underestimating side
(altho' Steve is a clever chap) a few hours reading
www.diveintopython.org and you can certainly be useful. Typing "python
your_query" into google pretty much gets you lucky with documentation
IME.

> Given
> that Python's type checking is effectively non-existent, this is even

Seems a lot fussier than perl's.

P