Acceptance of OpenOffice.org

[Python]

On Thu, 2006-03-16 at 09:08 -0500, Paul Lussier wrote:
> What I find most interesting is that Perl and Python were both started
> at roughly the same time in the late 1980s.  So why is Python just
> *now* becoming popular?

http://www.python.org/doc/faq/general.html#why-was-python-created-in-the-first-place
It was created for the Amoeba distributed operating system group at CWI
in the Netherlands.  Perl was created for Unix as a *much* better
replacement for sed/awk/bash scripting.  Perl started in a main stream
environment and filled a real need with a great solution.

I really did not mean to come across as saying Python is better than
Perl.  I was reacting to some of the education remarks advocating C and
Java as teaching languages.  So many people today need to be able to
program as an adjunct to their real profession.  I did include a link to
the Software Carpentry Course (University of Toronto) which I think is a
better fit for a programming course today.  I came across the course
because of the Python content, but  would certainly recommend that kind
of course if it taught Perl instead.  I don't know what Larry Wall has
in mind for Perl 6, but it might not be so very different from what Ruby
offers today.

Computer Science folks will need to cover a whole lot more in terms of
ideas, data structures and languages.

-- 
Lloyd Kvam
Venix Corp