"Some people think Perl is a good deal more expressive and powerful for them. A whole lot more people would if they managed to get past their initial reaction."
Don't shoot me, but I also observe a similar symptom with high-priced and/or hard-to-move-away-from "corporate" (as in "boring") products. The more your company invested in said product, the more successful the enterprise will show up on internal communications, with little or no correlation however badly it failed.
People get attached to their investments, be they money, time or self-esteem. Or, in the corporate case, the jobs of the people who signed the check.
As for Python, as a long time pythonista, I can tell you there are many steps to Python-zen, exactly like what happens with Perl (I did a lot of Perl between 95 and 2002). The simplistic syntax hides a lot of power that elude the newbie. When I review my early code, I see it as childish and crude.
If someone wants to learn new languages, I always advise them to learn something as different and "alien" from his/her comfort zone as possible. Haskell is a good choice, a Lisp like Clojure or Scheme is another. And by learn I mean taking a couple years as a side hobby to do increasingly difficult problems, perhaps some you already took with your comfortable-set. It _has_ to be an enlightening experience or it loses the purpose.
Don't shoot me, but I also observe a similar symptom with high-priced and/or hard-to-move-away-from "corporate" (as in "boring") products. The more your company invested in said product, the more successful the enterprise will show up on internal communications, with little or no correlation however badly it failed.
People get attached to their investments, be they money, time or self-esteem. Or, in the corporate case, the jobs of the people who signed the check.
As for Python, as a long time pythonista, I can tell you there are many steps to Python-zen, exactly like what happens with Perl (I did a lot of Perl between 95 and 2002). The simplistic syntax hides a lot of power that elude the newbie. When I review my early code, I see it as childish and crude.
If someone wants to learn new languages, I always advise them to learn something as different and "alien" from his/her comfort zone as possible. Haskell is a good choice, a Lisp like Clojure or Scheme is another. And by learn I mean taking a couple years as a side hobby to do increasingly difficult problems, perhaps some you already took with your comfortable-set. It _has_ to be an enlightening experience or it loses the purpose.