I rewrote my code in Python and I found myself running into many of the same hassles that I run into with other languages: inaccurate and incomplete documentation, a maze of little platform-specific quirks to work around in the base classes, and a macho community of users.
The python web site recommended Dive Into Python, so I learned by reading that. It has several examples that don't work because the Python base classes have changed behavior. I should have taken that as lesson. I tried to write portable Python code. The zlib CRC function returned different results on architectures between 32 bit and 64 bit architectures. I filed a bug report. It was closed, without a comment from the person who closed it. I get the unspoken message: bug reports are not welcome. I installed Cygwin on a Windows machine. I try to quit from an interactive Python session. It tells me that on my platform, I must press Control-Z to exit. I press Control-Z and it makes Python a background process. I tried to use the XML.minidom. The documentation here is minimal as well. So I read up on other web sites. It turns out that the interface has changed quite a bit from the documentation I found on other web sites. Where are the much loved docstrings? In 2.3 minidom, they are sparse and cryptic. Between 2.4 and 2.5, tempfile returns a different type of object. My code cannot have a single test, it has check for type(obj) == file or obj.__class__ == tempfile._TemporaryFileWrapper. I decided to make a tkinter front-end for a Python program. I decided to go with tkinter because it is included with many Python installations, so it maximizes the chance for my program to run out of the box. The tkinter documentation on the Python site mainly consists of loose notes and links to other sites. The documentation on other sites is great, if you already know how to use tkinter. I ran into bugs in TkAqua which make the grid layout unusable for me. So I will need to ask potential users to install Xcode, X11, and mac ports, if they want to run my program. In short, there is plenty of room for improvement. Admittedly these are not problems with the language definition. But I downloaded a Python distribution, and the problems are Python specific. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
