Re: Python and Flaming Thunder

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Dave Parker
<daveparker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The "Flaming Thunder" looks promising, but without being free
> software, it's unlikely it will create a large developer community,
> specially considering both free general purpose and scientific
> programming languages.

Perhaps. Flaming Thunder is only $19.95 per year for an individual
(and even less per individual for site licenses), which is less than
the cost of just one book on Python.

Bah, subscription for a programming language? As far as I'm
concerned, that's reason enough not to bother with it. Paying a
one-time fee, or even once per upgrade, for a full-featured IDE and
lots of support tools is painful but at least justifiable, whereas
paying a yearly license just to even be able to try something out when
there are so many free, sufficient options... There was an article
on/in Wired not so long ago about the economics of free, and how
there's a huge difference mentally between free and not-free, even if
the practical difference is "free" and "$0.01." (Also, I assume
hdante meant, at least partly, free as in speech, not free as in
beer.)

As an aside, I clearly haven't written anything in FT, but looking at
your examples I don't know that I would want to--there's something
that feels very unnatural about writing English as code. It also
somehow seems a bit verbose, while one of the strengths of something
like Python (since that's what you're comparing it to) is rapid
implementation. Just using your "Set ... to" idiom, rather than a
regular = assignment, makes things much more wordy, without improving
readability. Some of your other structures are awkward, for instance
"Something is a function doing" Again, more text with arguably no gain
in readability.

Just my two cents, anyway. I now return you to the resident madman,
who I see has sent 4 or 5 messages while I was typing this one...
.

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