Grant Edwards wrote:
In an interview at http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=273
Alan Kay said something I really liked, and I think it applies
equally well to Python as well as the languages mentioned:
I characterized one way of looking at languages in this way: a lot of them are either the agglutination of features or they're a crystallization of style. Languages such as APL, Lisp, and Smalltalk are what you might call style languages, where there's a real center and imputed style to how you're supposed to do everything.
I think that "a crystallization of style" sums things up nicely. The rest of the interview is pretty interesting as well.
Then Perl is an "agglutination of styles", while Python might be considered a "crystallization of features"...
Bah. My impressions from the interview was "there are no good languages anymore. In my time we made great languages, but today they all suck. Perl for example...." I got the impressions that the interview is as bad for python as for perl and any of the languages of the 90's and 00's.
From the interview:
""" You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were.
So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.
"""
So, let's not be so self-important <winkus>, and see this interview as one who bashes perl and admires python. It aint. Python is pop culture according to Mr Kay. I'll leave the rest to slashdot..
jfj -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
