Last Friday. Knowing almost no Python at noon, by 5pm I had some code to munge XML and do something useful for my current project.
So it’s not bad. It’s good for productivity. Mostly because:
- It has useful libraries.
- Bread-and-butter data structures are built in, i.e. lists and dictionaries.
- I don’t care too much about performance for small tasks.
I can deal with significant whitespace, and a few syntactic things trip me up (like colons after if statements), but that’s small beans.
There are a few things on the minus side:
- All that stuff with self just seems like ugly boilerplate extra typing.
- Philosophically, I don’t like a BDFL unilaterally breaking backwards compatibility and removing FP features.
Overall, Python is just fine, but underwhelming. It doesn’t have a monopoly on the good features, which makes it really just another learn-on-demand scripting language.