On 17 Jun 2005 21:10:37 -0700, "Michele Simionato" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Andrea Griffini wrote: >> Why hinder ? > ... >To be able to content himself with a shallow knowledge >is a useful skill ;) Ah! ... I agree. Currently for example my knowledge of Zope is pretty close to 0.00%, but I'm using it and I'm happy with it. I did what I was asked to do and took way less time than hand-writing the cgi stuff required. Every single time I've to touch those scripts I've to open the Zope book to get the correct method names. But I'd never dare to call myself a zope developer... with it I'm just at the "hello world" stage even if I accomplished what would require a lot of CGI expertise. But once I remember running in a problem; there was a file of about 80Mb uploaded in the Zope database that I wasn't able to extract. I was simply helpless: download always stopped arount 40Mb without any error message. I wandered on IRC for a day finding only other people that were better than me (that's easy) but not good enough to help me. In the end someone gave me the right suggestion, I just installed a local zope on my pc, copied the database file, extracted the file from the local instance and, don't ask me why, it worked. This very kind of problem solution (just try doing stupid things without understanding until you get something that looks like working) is what I hate *MOST*. That's one reason for which I hate windows installation/maintenance; it's not an exact science, it's more like try and see what happens. With programming that is something that IMO doesn't pay in the long run. I'm sure that someone that really knows Zope would have been able to get that file out in a minute, and may be doing exactly what I did. But knowing why! And this is a big difference. Indeed when talking about if learning "C" can hinder or help learning "C++" I remember thinking that to learn "C++" *superficially* learning "C" first is surely pointless or can even hinder. But to learn "C++" deeply (with all its quirks) I think that learning "C" first helps. So may be this better explain my position; if you wanna become a "real" programmer, one that really has things under control, then learning a simple assembler first is the main path (ok, may be even a language like C can be a reasonable start, but even in such a low-level language there are already so many things that are easier to understand if you really started from bytes). However, to be able to do just useful stuff with a computer you don't need to start that low; you can start from python (or, why not, even dreamweaver). Andrea -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
