On Saturday 21 September 2013 01:34:50 Chris Angelico did opine: > On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 3:40 AM, Aseem Bansal <asmbans...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Friday, September 20, 2013 10:04:32 PM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote: > >> On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 2:28 AM, Aseem Bansal <asmbans...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> > I hope that cleared some confusion about what I wanted to ask. I > >> > wanted to gauge myself to find if I am progressing or not. > >> > >> Well, based on my definition, that's easy to answer. Have you solved > >> problems using Python? If you have a bunch of HTML pages and you need > >> to get some info out of all of them by COB today, do you think "I can > >> do that with Python", or do you think "I can do that with sed, awk, > >> grep, and five levels of pipe"? The tools you use for an urgent job > >> will be the ones you know. > >> > >> ChrisA > > > > Yeah I have... > > But that was pure luck that I had done the random example that you had > > chosen. It would be difficult to find my overall progress by the one > > thing. > > > > I am currently unemployed so the sense of urgency isn't there > > normally. That's why I asked this question. But I got your point. > > It wasn't exactly a random example; it's an extremely common task > (maybe without the "must be done today" restriction), and one that > Python happens to do fairly well. :) > > There was a time, back in the 1990s, when REXX was my primary > language. (We were exclusively an OS/2 shop at the time, so it was a > good choice.) If I needed to write a quick script, it would be in > REXX. If I needed to parse text, I'd use REXX. If I wanted a GUI app, > I'd write it in VX-REXX. Later on, when I needed to write Windows > code, I tended to use C++. It wasn't till the late 2000s that I > started using Python for those sorts of jobs - even though I'd met the > language back in the 90s - indicating that that's when I actually knew > the language. > > ChrisA
That also brings back fond memories of the days of the amiga, Chris. We had a huge superset of REXX called ARexx, which brought every system call that AmigaDOS had right into the script writers usage menu. Jim Hines and I wrote the only cron the amiga ever had that didn't busy wait, so cpu usage was minimal. Called it EzCron. Gave it away. Then since the x10 stuff for home automation was /the/ system back in the day, we wrote EzHome, which had an MUI driven gui, and sold that for a time. It, ARexx, was written by a William Hawes, and sold thru the commie dealer chains at the time. I've no clue whatever became of that gentleman after that, but it came to light much that he never got a dime for writing ARexx from those 2 crooks that bought commie and moved it to the Bahamas where he, nor anyone else, could sue to collect. I did note that for many years, there was a subdir on kernel.org for him to work in, but to my knowledge it was empty when I downloaded and built my first x86 based linux kernel in early 1998, and remained empty till whenever. I was quite pleased to see that there was a Rexx/Regina for linux, and for about 10 minutes thought I could make use of the library of ARexx code Jim & I had carved up and had running on the amiga, but was very disappointed to see that Regina wasn't coupled to the os itself in any way, causing our scripts to barf and exit within the first 3 or 4 lines of code. Our first web page at WDTV.com in the winter of 1999-2000 was served up on a dialup circuit, by an ARexx script we wrote, from an amiga 2000. Heady days, those, while the dosboxes were still struggling with trumpet, and choking on the all the amiga, pdp and VAX dust. But time marches on, while the amiga didn't. I've seen python doing some heady stuff in the last 5 years, but the learning curve is pretty steep for my now aging wet ram, which will be 79 years old in a few days, so the scripting language here at the Heskett Ranchette is bash, and there is quite a boatload of that running as background daemons right now. So I lurk, reading what goes by, hoping I'll learn enough python from osmosis to get comfortable with it. From all indications, it is todays "ARexx" of scripting languages. I'll get me coat now. :) Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://gene.homelinux.net:6309/gene> should be up! As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct. -- Larry Wall in <199710161841.laa13...@wall.org> A pen in the hand of this president is far more dangerous than 200 million guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
