On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 6:01 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Monday, August 25, 2014 9:11:39 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote: > >> Sure. And your reduction of AWS bills sounds great. Just make sure you >> don't consume the entire extra coder's time doing things that Python >> would have done for you. Go's character model is inferior to Python >> 3's (or at least, it was last time I checked - stuff might have >> changed since then), so you may find yourself doing a lot of >> unnecessary work to make sure your code works correctly. Do be sure to >> test everything thoroughly, with characters from all over Unicode. > > Heh! You make it sound that the character model is the most important thing > in choosing a language! > There are people using Fortran -- with not intention of finding > an alternative.
Heh. Well, in some ways, it is. When you advise someone on how to choose a car, do you say "Make sure you get one with wheels"? No. You assume it. There are far more important aspects to a programming language, but most of them are fairly obvious (and often universal). Also, if someone's trying to decide between C (manual memory management, compiled, detaily) and Python (garbage collected, high level), he'll know the issues. I'm referring here to something that might be a surprise way down the track. Let's take a concrete example. You want to build a database-backed dynamic web site. You could use PHP and MySQL, and a few years ago that would be your only option if you want cheap web hosting. Or you could use Python and PostgreSQL, tying in with Passenger to manage stuff under Apache. Or you could write an entire HTTP server in Python (using http.server or BaseHTTPServer, perhaps), putting it on a dedicated IP or port. Or you could probably craft something horrendous out of bash scripts, massive pipelines, and some command-line tool that binds to a port (I know you can use /dev/tcp/hostname/port to connect, not sure how you'd listen). If someone asks you for advice, what aspects of each would you highlight? Obvious stuff doesn't need to be mentioned (like "PHP uses braces, if you hate braces then use Python", and "doing it all with bash pipelines is Just Plain Dumb"), and what you need to say is stuff like "Doing it with http.server will limit you to one CPU core" and "Doing it with PHP means you don't get Unicode support". So yes, I think it was the most important thing to mention, because it's something that isn't obvious to a lot of people. You test your code with stuff you can type, and it works fine. Other people use non-ASCII characters, and nearly everything works, but there are just these occasional glitches (because your code's working with UTF-8 bytes, and every once in a while it counts things differently or something). Working with bytes instead of characters is one of the most subtle problems to infect a program, because 99%+ of it works fine. And properly fixing it is a huge job. That's why it's worth saying, even if character model isn't actually the one most important feature of a programming language. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
