[CentOS] OT: programming language for morons (newbie friendly language in Open Source world)

Mon Dec 13 17:59:33 UTC 2010
Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org>

On Mon, 2010-12-13 at 11:53 -0500, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > On Mon, 2010-12-13 at 17:14 +0100, Sven Aluoor wrote:
> >> Hi folks
> >> I have more than 12 years experience with UNIX system administration,
> >> but I am too stupid for programming. My only programming experience is
> >> shell scripting. I tried to learn Java, but don't understand it
> >> because it is too complicated for my limited brainpower.
> >> What programming language should I learn?
> >> A friend said that C-Sharp (Mono) is very simple. Is this true?
> <snip>
> > Another one to look at is Python.  You can probably get off-the-ground
> <snip>
> And python's the only language to use whitespace as a syntax element....

True, which is a serious -1 in my book.  And there is an annoying C.S.
uber-geek thread in the Python community obsessed with the most
"pythonic" way to solve a problem. 

*But* I am the primary developer of a large Python application
<http://www.ohloh.net/p/coils> [113K lines and growing] and it *is( an
effective language/stack.   The available toolkits are high-quality and
I've been quite impressed with the performance [initially I had serious
doubts].

My only real usability gripe is the craptastic type management, static
typing would be a big improvement. [But pythonista's heads would explode
at having to eat their own dog-food about writing 'self documenting
code'].