On My Language Beating up Your Language
Three semesters ago, when I began working as an adjunct, I was faced with a choice. I could start teaching my intro to programming course using the language and tools with which I was most comfortable (C#, VS.NET) or I could reuse the syllabus, quizzes, assignments and homeworks of the course as it had been taught in the prior semester (Python, Eclipse). I opted for the latter. Learning a new language seemed a more practical endeavor than learning to write a college course.
Since I’ve been working working with Python, I’ve started to let go of the “my language can beat up your language” attitude I’d held since leaving VB for C#. Of course C# can definitely beat up VB.NET, but I digress… As useful as type safety is, I no longer believe that it makes me a better person. I’ve grown very comfortable with writing code that is far less explicit than SomeClass sc = new SomeClass();.
I’ve been digging Python for some time now and have adopted IronPython as my favorite way to make my .NET apps extensible. Lately I’ve also been looking into Ruby. It’s clearly the product of a serious psychosis, but it’s proving to be a fascinating language. From strings to symbols to blocks, Ruby is just different enough to make learning a language exciting again.
Over the next few months as I continue my Python and Ruby exploration, I’ll share what I consider to be some of the more unique features that make these languages worth a look. I’ll end this post with one of my favorite features in Python - the else clause in while loops. Consider the following contrived example:
response = ""
while response != "valid":
response = raw_input("Please enter a valid response: ")
else:
print "Thank you for your valid response"