Bruno Desthuilliers wrote: > gord wrote: >> As a complete novice in the study of Python, I am asking myself where this >> language is superior or better suited than others. For example, all I see in >> the tutorials are lots of examples of list processing, arithmetic >> calculations - all in a DOS-like environment. > > s/DOS-like/command line/ > > The command line interface is widely used on unix-like systems, and is > very handy for a lot of things.
In general, I think using the keyboard more and the mouse less is typically a win, both in power of expression and in speed. I don't think it's a coincidence that most of us use the keyboard and plain text to communicate in this forum. Writing text by pointing, dragging and clicking instead of by typing, would probably slow us down quite a bit. I feel much more productive in bash than in most Windows apps. (I still like to have several terminal windows though.) My seven year old son did play a bit with magnetic letters we have on the fridge door in the kitchen (when he was small, he'd say now) but he's dropped that entirely in favor of pencil and paper. His two year old brother can play with that fridge-based GUI... When we reach a certain level of expertize, we often find it easier to pick the things we put together from our memory and imagination, rather than from some kind of menu in our field of vision. Ok, the keyboard is a kind of menu too, but that's not the point. The important thing is that text is an extremely powerful way of conveying information that we've used for thousands of years. It's far more sophisticated than pointing at visible objects. Also, a tool like Python isn't bound to keyboards, like VB is bound to the Windows GUI. Almost everything, from network traffic, to GUI interaction, to hardware manipulations can be effectively translated to and from text formats. Not that Python can't handle binary data, but going via textual representations usually makes testing, debugging and understanding much easier. I'd suggest that the OP look at the Wikipedia page in Unix Philosophy. Read about Gancarz tenets, and replace shell scripts with Python. (Of course, Python offers more elaborate communication than pipes.) I'd also the link to Joel Spolsky's Biculturalism article, and read that. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
