Python

Well gosh, what about Python, a nice language that has patiently been waiting in the wings for all these years? The Python community has long been the refuge for folks who finally took the red pill and woke up from the Perl Matrix.

Well, they're just like the Smalltalk folks, who waited forever to replace C++, and then Java came along and screwed them royally, and permanently. Oops. Ruby's doing exactly that to Python, right now, today. Practically overnight.

Python would have taken over the world, but it has two fatal flaws: the whitespace thing, and the permafrost thing.

The whitespace thing is simply that Python uses indentation to determine block nesting. It forces you to indent everything a certain way, and they do this so that everyone's code will look the same. A surprising number of programmers hate this, because it feels to them like their freedom is being taken away; it feels as if Python is trampling their constitutional right to use shotgun formatting and obfuscated one-liners.3

Python's author, Guido Van Rossum, also made some boneheaded technical blunders early on — none quite as extravagant as Larry's blunders, but a few were real doozies nonetheless. For instance, Python originally had no lexical scoping. But it didn't have dynamic scoping either, and dynamic scoping may have its share of problems, but it at least sort of works. Python had NOTHING except for global and local (function) scope, so even though it had a "real" OO system, classes couldn't even access their own damned instance variables. You have to pass a "self" parameter to EVERY instance method and then get to your instance data by accessing it through self. So everything in Python is self, selfself, selfselfself, selfSELFselfSELF__SELF__, and it drives you frigging nuts, even if you don't mind the whitespace thing.


Etc.

But in my opinion, it's really the frost thing that killed Python, and has prevented it from ever achieving its wish to be the premier scripting language, or the premier anything language, for that matter. Heck, people still use Tcl as an embedded interpreter, even though Python is far superior to Tcl in every conceivable way — except, that is, for the frost thing.

What's the frost thing, you ask? Well, I used to have a lot of exceptionally mean stuff written here, but since Python's actually quite pleasant to work with (if you can overlook its warts), I no longer think it's such a great idea to bash on Pythonistas. The "frost thing" is just that they used to have a tendency to be a bit, well, frosty. Why?

Because they were so tired of hearing about the whitespace thing!

I think that's why Python never reached Perl's level of popularity, but maybe I'm just imagining things.


P.S. Този откъс е взет от същото место от където си цитирал за C++ ... А болднатият текст мисля казва всичко