Here's To The Alternatives

Hello,
Now I've been a C zealot for over 10 years, turning my nose up at pretty much every new language that comes into fashion and engaging in all sorts of zany schemes to feed my fetish (writing a DirectShow filter in pure C was I think my poorest decision yet :o).

But one particularly boring evening a few weeks ago, I downloaded a Python interpreter and played around.

And it was soooo good.

It is nice to come up with a project and have pretty much every library you could need already in front of you. I wanted a way to download messages from a POP3 server and relay them to my own e-mail server. The examples semed to have a dependency on fcntl (which is a Linux library), but after less than an hour of tinkering from scratch, it was done.

I also decided to try out some HTML 5 features in JavaScript. Never really had time for this stuff, my only experience being when I come across some quite horrible scripts on some commercial sites that cause the "A script on this page is running slowly" message to appear. But with a Canvas object, some Audio objects and a bit of imagination I found myself cobbling together things that I used to rely on SDL to provide. Granted, this only works because we have multi-gigahertz CPUs and generous amounts of RAM, but the simplicity with which you can make cross-platform apps these days is genuinely encouraging. :cool:

But this doesn't apply to Java. No. Java should die in a fire.

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Originally Posted by SMurf

But this doesn't apply to Java. No. Java should die in a fire.

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I agree.

I started playing with python over the last couple of years, and find it to be very useful.

I'll third that Java should die in a fire.

I used to be the same way; I learned C, saw that it had the ability to be faster than any other language, and thought, "Why write in any other language?" I ended up trying out Python for whatever reason and I've been spoiled by it ever since. The massive standard library with its many built-in data structures and the welcoming pseudocode syntax won me over. The nice thing is that since C++'s standard library is expanding quickly, you can at least jump to C++ with ease if you need a more "real" language with data structures OOTB.

Python is just great for taking an initial idea and making a quick program to test the idea. You can even create the whole thing in Python if you want and either leave it there or port to C++. Python is pretty fast, too.

I always do researchy stuff with Python. It's definitely competitive to (though not compatible with) Matlab for many purposes.

Have you checked out Anaconda?