[cumbria_lug] To Python, or not to Python?

[Luke Antins]

Trevor Pearson wrote:
> Dave Murphy wrote:
>    
>> On Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:34:38 +0100
>> Trevor Pearson<trevor at haven.demon.co.uk>  wrote:
>>      
>>> Is there really a need for all these languages ?  could we just settle
>>> for having a couple, you know, one for quick scripts, one for longer and
>>> more complicated scripts and a heavy-duty compiled behemoth for the
>>> 'big' jobs?
>>>        
>> ...but learning one or two languages to the point of being able to be
>> productive quickly and easily when required (i.e. when someone's paying
>> you) is better that trying everything out for the sake of it. From that
>> perspective Perl, Python and Ruby win out over Erlang, Lisp etc.
>> (unless, of course, you're specialising in a field where those
>> languages are prevalent - in web  work they're not)
>>      
> I'm not being too serious there, but since you mention it, there are
> good reasons to at least be familiar with a variety of languages.  In my
> case most of the work is on existing systems, some written in java
> others in perl, some '.net' code and shell scripts.  True enough
> specialisation is key to being productive, efficient and effective.
>    
I also believe a knowledge of other languages outside what you need is a 
good thing.
Recently I've seen a lot of people talking about things the Smalltalk 
people learned
over 20 years ago that us in the newer dynamic languages are only just 
'discovering'.

I'm not saying you need to become a pro in these languages to get 
anything out of them.
But the knowledge can sure help when it comes to solving complicated 
problems!

At $dayjob I'm dealing with a custom binary protocol of ours, 
communicating with remote
devices using SMS/GPRS, potentially having to deal with millions of 
'messages' per day.
Erlang has some funky binary pattern matching that could be very useful 
to me!
It's also kinda build for 'server' code (for lack of a better way of 
expressing what I mean :p)
But as is always the case, time is my enemy! *sob* =)

Luke
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