[Zope] Easy my *$%&#@$%!

[Thomas B. Passin]

[John Schinnerer]
>
> Be honest now - how many of you saying "python is really easy to learn"
> or equivalent here recently would have said that when you first started
> using it?
>
> I'm not a newbie to programming, and I find python quite cryptic and
> confusing, especially all those mysterious underscores and 'self' and
> 'context' and mandatory indentation and so on and on.  And then there's
> trying to understand and use it in/with Zope.
>

I found it very easy.  Some of those thing you mention are Zope things, not
native Python things.  Mandatory indentation, of course, is, but I found
that delightful (of course, you do have to be careful about mixing and
matching tabs and spaces, that's a small drawback).  In non-Zope Python,
there are very few times you need to get into underscores, "context" doesn't
exist, and "self" is a placeholder meaning roughly the same thing as "this"
in some other languages.

For me, Python works about the same as I would write pseudocode, so I found
it really easy to get started with.  More advanced features like lambda
expressions and list comprehensions are harder to grasp, but you don't have
to use them yourself.

Now that's for code you write yourself.  If you look at code someone else
has written, that gets tricky and fiddles with module dictionaries and
default behaviors, I agree that can be hard to understand.  But you can do
most anything you would want to do in a script without tricky things like
that.

Cheers,

Tom P