>> I've been contemplating tackling Python, in spite of the 2.x/3.x thing. (...) > Thankfully, that's mostly gone now. Few enterprises still holding out, but m

>> I've been contemplating tackling Python, in spite of the 2.x/3.x thing. (...) > Thankfully, that's mostly gone now. Few enterprises still holding out, but most of the big libraries are 2/3 or 3 only. Oh okay. I think I got got mildly tangled by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13019819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13019819 a little while back. > Awk is different, but great. > I had a boss at a previous job who'd used it for at least a decade for everything, so I had to learn the nitty-gritty. > I ended up building a CGI application that basically ran the entire website in Awk. Big learning experience, but rather cool. Oh nice. That's kind of awesome. (I was referring to gawk when I mentioned the 632K thing.) > But, at least Lua is an amazing language too, if a bit odd at times. I seriously don't understand why they won't allow ++ and -- and similar conveniences we've grown to almost expect from other languages... (info about (Scheme)) This syntax looks fairly familiar (Lisp syntax is after all incredibly reductionist) and I remember ! from Ruby. > After working a little while with it, those parenthesis won't be as scary, and you probably won't even notice them. Haha, I remember someone telling me that about {} in C-like languages (PHP) a decade ago. I still notice them... but I know where to use them and what they're for now. I don't think my brain will sprout a number-of-closing-parens-needed checker anytime soon; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing is generally established to be mentally impossible for >4 items, so... (putting (everything) in parens) is fun, but s)t))ac))))ki))n)g) the closing ones onto single lines is... well all my brain's coming up with is a slightly incredulous blank stare. -- By the way: I'm not quite sure how relevant this is to wherever you are (which I haven't been able to concretely ascertain), but I'm in Sydney. Curious to learn how far away I am from you, perhaps via email. (I may have poked through some of your tales... and now I have to deal with a brain that's scrambling around trying to find a signup button so I can trail along with you sometime. =P) PS. Just hit HN's post ratelimit for the first time, which was why this took a while to appear. Sorry!