March 21, 2006

Do you really need Python ?

I love Python, it's wonderful. But what does in do in fact ? It limits the things you can do in different, previously unseen ways. It shifts your development paradigm big time. It gives you different ways to express your ideas.

But what happens if you stick to Python (or any other language or technology in fact) ? You become dependent on it to get something done. Yes, in this developer-tool symbiosis you do gain a lot, in a short run. But in the long run it ends with useless comparisons like "Ruby is better than Python", or "Java is better than C++", where each party protects its own investments.

I argue that languages and technologies do not matter, it's your development virtue which makes things, not the syntactic constructs or deployment schemes. It's like with math - you have a handful of simple facts and more or less simple rules, and how far you can go only depends on you. There is no reason why you can't build good stuff in Python, C++, Forth or Visual Basic, although the particular schematics will be different for sure.

Therefore, instead of praising Python, why not simply enjoying it while it lasts ?

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