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Alex Martelli, Python Guru and Python in a Nutshell author, talked to our very own Josette Garcia about the past and future of Python, Martelli's role at Google, what he misses about Italy, working with his wife and how he feels about Erlang. Link
Here's a snippet:
Q. 13. Python continues to attract more and more interest from programmers skilled in other languages. Have you any learning recommendations for people moving to Python?My top recommendation is to consider that you probably don't have to MOVE to Python, in many cases: Python can probably play nicely with the languages you used to prefer (C++, Java, Objective C, C#, Fortran, ...), so you can "have your cake and eat it too" -- keep using the frameworks, libraries and tools you know and love, use Python to keep it all together and flowing smoothly towards your applications' goals ....
.... The second-from-the-top recommendation is to bend over backwards to NOT program in Python "as if" you were programming in your previous favorite language -- this applies to ANY case where a programmer is adding a new language to their quiver, but more so when the new language is especially powerful and flexible: I've seen people "do Cobol in Java", "do Fortran in C++", "do C in Perl", etc, but "do X in Python" is scarily widespread for many values of X. The more different languages you're skilled with, and the more idiomatically you've learned to employ each of them, the less this particular risk becomes -- but especially if Python is just your second language, *beware* of striving to use it "just as if it was" PHP, or Perl, or Java, or... it _isn't_ --
(The photo is a still from an Alex Martelli interview with James Turner on O'Reilly.com).
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