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Python Productivity Gain?

Matthias no at spam.pls
Wed Feb 18 09:45:11 EST 2004 
claird at lairds.com (Cameron Laird) writes:

> [...]
> Maybe you mean something different by "political" than I under-
> stand.

I used politics in the broad sense of "social relations involving
authority or power" (WordNet), not in the narrow sense related to
governments or political parties.  My wording could have been more
careful, sorry.

> Incidentally, although I haven't made an opportunity to speak
> with him deeply about this, I'm willing to bet that Guido *does*
> regard Python as an experiment, and an instance of "actual re-
> search".

I'm thankful that Python exists as it is my favorite language for some
application domains.  But I think in your last sentence your concept
of "research" is different from the one I was using in previous posts.
I was using "research" as "systematic investigation to establish
facts" (WordNet) as in physics, psychology, some social sciences, or
engineering.  I'm aware that other understandings are common and make
sense.

My posting was not against creators of new languages, tools,
methodologies but against publishing strong and general claims on the
potential benefits without having to offer the slightest piece of
unbiased evidence.

Some questions concerning programming languages debated on usenet
almost endlessly (typing, garbage collection, syntax issues) could be
_resolved_ using lab experiments.  That there goes so much effort into
marketing and apparently only little into actual experiments is what I
criticize.
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