"Rui Maciel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | Recently I woke up inclined to take up the task of learning another | programming language. I've already dipped my toes in Perl (I've read online | tutorials and wrote a couple of irrelevant pet projects) but, as the | computers at my workplace only sport the python interpreter, it probably | means that learning python will end up serving me better, at least in the | short run. Plus, you know how Perl goes.
If you intend to use Python on the computer at your workplace, then learn the version installed there. | So far the decision seems to be a no brainer. Yet, Python 3000 will arrive | in a few months. As it isn't backwards compatible with today's Python, | there is the risk that no matter what I learn until then, I will end up | having to re-learn at least a considerable part of the language. Most of the changes are deletions and additions, rather than changes. 3.0a4 will be out in a few days. If you had no reason to use anything else, I would consider starting with that. (But the IDLE IDE on Windows may still not work right.) | To put it in other words, I fear that I will be wasting my time. If you learn and use 2.x, then avoid things that are going away. In particular: Unless you need to learn about old-style classes, I would not bother with them and the differences from new, soon to be the only style, classes. Derive all your classes from object or a subclass thereof. Use // for integer floor division (ie, when you want 1/2 == 0. Use 'from __future__ import division' if you use '/' in a file where both operands might be ints and you would want 1/2==.5. | At least that is what a clueless newbie believes. As this group is | frequented by people who have more insight into all things pythonesque, | what are your thoughts on this? Diverse, I am sure ;-) Terry Jan Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
