Paul Graham on Python hackers

Paul Graham's recent book "Hackers & Painters" may be interesting
readers for Python programmers. He likes flexible languages like
Python, although Lisp is his favorite. Here is a quote from his book,
also online at http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html , where he contrasts
Python and Java programmers. He is opinionated :).

"When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're not
just making a technical decision. You're also making a social
decision, and this may be the more important of the two. For example,
if your company wants to write some software, it might seem a prudent
choice to write it in Java. But when you choose a language, you're
also choosing a community. The programmers you'll be able to hire to
work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to
work on a project written in Python. [2] And the quality of your
hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though,
frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell
you something about the relative merits of those languages.

Business types prefer the most popular languages because they view
languages as standards. They don't want to bet the company on Betamax.
The thing about languages, though, is that they're not just standards.
If you have to move bits over a network, by all means use TCP/IP. But
a programming language isn't just a format. A programming language is
a medium of expression."

As a whole, this is my favorite book of the last two years, and I read a
lot.  There hasn't yet been a chapter that I started to glaze over, most
other book there is always a point where my hand started to turn the pages
faster.
Really good stuff
<beliavsky@aol.com> wrote in message
news:3064b51d.0408061127.32536826@posting.google.com...
> Paul Graham's recent book "Hackers & Painters" may be interesting
> readers for Python programmers. He likes flexible languages like
> Python, although Lisp is his favorite. Here is a quote from his book,
> also online at http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html , where he contrasts
> Python and Java programmers. He is opinionated :).
>
> "When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're not
> just making a technical decision. You're also making a social
> decision, and this may be the more important of the two. For example,
> if your company wants to write some software, it might seem a prudent
> choice to write it in Java. But when you choose a language, you're
> also choosing a community. The programmers you'll be able to hire to
> work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to
> work on a project written in Python. [2] And the quality of your
> hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though,
> frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell
> you something about the relative merits of those languages.
>
> Business types prefer the most popular languages because they view
> languages as standards. They don't want to bet the company on Betamax.
> The thing about languages, though, is that they're not just standards.
> If you have to move bits over a network, by all means use TCP/IP. But
> a programming language isn't just a format. A programming language is
> a medium of expression."

Yeah, but Graham goes on to lump perl in with python, so he clearly
doesn't know what he's talking about. :)

(In all seriousness I think python and java have a lot more in common
than python and perl.)

-Jonathan

Original Message Follows:
> Paul Graham's recent book "Hackers & Painters" may be interesting
> readers for Python programmers. He likes flexible languages like
> Python, although Lisp is his favorite. Here is a quote from his book,
> also online at http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html , where he contrasts
> Python and Java programmers. He is opinionated :).
>
> "When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're not
> just making a technical decision. You're also making a social
> decision, and this may be the more important of the two. For example,
> if your company wants to write some software, it might seem a prudent
> choice to write it in Java. But when you choose a language, you're
> also choosing a community. The programmers you'll be able to hire to
> work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to
> work on a project written in Python. [2] And the quality of your
> hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though,
> frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell
> you something about the relative merits of those languages.

On Fri, 06 Aug 2004 22:23:59 -0700, ellisjb wrote:
> (In all seriousness I think python and java have a lot more in common than
> python and perl.)

This a flamebait, right? Otherwise I would be interested in the features
which make Python similar to Java (shudder).

--
Zoltan

On Sat, 07 Aug 2004 12:51:17 +0200, Zoltan Sekeres <zoltan@teliko.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 06 Aug 2004 22:23:59 -0700, ellisjb wrote: 
>
> This a flamebait, right? Otherwise I would be interested in the features
> which make Python similar to Java (shudder).

Magical @ symbols? :)

--
Sam Holden

>>>>> "zoltan" == Zoltan Sekeres <zoltan@teliko.net> writes:

zoltan> On Fri, 06 Aug 2004 22:23:59 -0700, ellisjb wrote:
 

zoltan> This a flamebait, right? Otherwise I would be interested
zoltan> in the features which make Python similar to Java
zoltan> (shudder).

Abundant reference semantics. Of course this is true of all OOP
language, and Java doesn't go all the way with it either, but it's the
most popular language that does it. It is also the first OOP language
that does it that I tried, and I totally digged Java for a while
before meeting Python and other languages that do it, and realized
Java is still yet another static-typing-done-wrong low level language.

--
Ville Vainio   http://tinyurl.com/2prnb

ellisjb@my-deja.com writes:

> Yeah, but Graham goes on to lump perl in with python,

it doesn't make much of a difference. They are both infinitely much
better than J*** .

> so he clearly
> doesn't know what he's talking about. :)
>


> (In all seriousness I think python and java have a lot more in common
> than python and perl.)
>

no, that's not the case, as Java lacks something akin to perl's eval
and python's exec.
In addition, Java lacks asynchronous system calls and is thus unable
to implement the curses library, unlike perl and python.
on top of all, perl and python allow to write empty programs,
whereas in that crap of Java, it's already hard to write a program
that does nothing. Already  hello world in Java is a monster
that turns away decent hackers.
And the Java standard is less opensource friendly than perl, python,
scheme, ruby, elastiC, tcl, lua ...
and all the other decent languages.

Klaus Schilling

Zoltan Sekeres <zoltan@teliko.net> writes:

> On Fri, 06 Aug 2004 22:23:59 -0700, ellisjb wrote: 
>
> This a flamebait, right?

I don't think so.  I've noticed that since I learnt Python, it is now
much more frequently compared to Java than Perl, and this is a change.

> Otherwise I would be interested in the features which make Python
> similar to Java (shudder).

I think it's at least as much social as technical.

Cheers,
mwh

--
First time I've gotten a programming job that required a drug
test.  I was worried they were going to say "you don't have
enough LSD in your system to do Unix programming".   -- Paul Tomblin
-- [url]http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Symin/ASR.Quotes.html[/url]

According to  <510046470588-0001@t-online.de>:
> whereas in that crap of Java, it's already hard to write a program
> that does nothing.

IIRC there was a stupid language shootout where the Java compiler noticed
the benchmark's main loop was a no-op and optimised it away, producing a
program that did nothing. So you do have the compiler to help you there.
;-)


--
Ng Pheng Siong <ngps@netmemetic.com>

http://firewall.rulemaker.net -+- cisco PIX & Netscreen Config Version Contr
ol
http://sandbox.rulemaker.net/ngps -+- M2Crypto, ZServerSSL for Zope, Blog

On 2004-08-07, Zoltan Sekeres <zoltan@teliko.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 06 Aug 2004 22:23:59 -0700, ellisjb wrote: 
>
> This a flamebait, right? Otherwise I would be interested in the features
> which make Python similar to Java (shudder).

In previous writings Graham tends to focus more on language fundamentals
rather than the scope of features or the process of compilation.  Python
is closer to Java in that they are both strongly Object Oriented languages i
n
contrast to perl's OO framework that feels more bolted on than integral
to me.  Both Python and Java tend to focus on providing a single clear
interface to a function rather than a multitude of synonyms and
syntaxes.  Conceptually, python is closer to java.  In terms of actual
implementation, python is closer to perl.