Many years ago I've decided it was time to pick up a modern programming language. In the past I had written lots of (Turbo) Pascal code, some x86 (and more exot

Many years ago I've decided it was time to pick up a modern programming language. In the past I had written lots of (Turbo) Pascal code, some x86 (and more exotic) Assembler and a bit of C, but then for several years I only did shell/awk scripts and ported C software to IRIX and SINIX/RU. So I sat down and decided to find a nice general-purpose language that I would focus on learning. I wasn't quite sure what for yet, but I decided I was going to pick one and stick with it. I didn't have the time to learn multiple languages and I didn't have a lot of time to try out different ones, so I just looked around a little bit. Some I ruled out early: C and it's relatives were just too verbose, I didn't want to spend the time writing all the error handling necessary just to read a damn file. I was doing a lot of sysadmin type work at the time and had therefore developed an intense disliking for Java. This was based on too much badly packaged Java software that even if you got it running at all was sluggish, hogging way too much memory and crashed with arcane error messages. I did like the quick & dirty way I could make things work in a shell script, so I looked mostly at scripting languages. I looked at Perl, which was the standard scripting language at the time and had a huge library (CPAN) of modules, which was great. I hated the syntax though and found the code often unreadable and there being too many ways of doing the same thing. I looked at Pike, which had the benefit of using a C syntax (which I already knew, so that was a plus), but it seemed not widely supported and nobody was using it (this hasn't changed since, it seems). I don't remember what else I looked at, but then there was Python. The syntax was a revelation. Here someone had finally made the most of creating a language from scratch and spent the time thinking about syntax and how to do away with largely pointless stuff (brackets), replacing it with things that everyone did anyways (indentation). It also came with a sizeable library of stuff that did almost everything I could dream of at the time. It was love at first sight. Recently I've spent £35 on a stainless steel mill that grinds salt when you twist it one way and pepper when you twist it the other way, just because I really love well thought out and engineered things that make stuff that's been around forever just a little bit better. That's how I feel about Python. It's not doing anything fantastically new or unique, but it's doing the stuff that others do just a little bit better. Today I'm doing lots of web stuff, some sysadmin stuff and random hacking of various things on the side. I'm still doing almost everything in Python and whenever Javascript bitches at me about a missed semicolon I do think: "All these fantastic things you can do in a web browser these days and you couldn't figure out that this command in an entirely different line isn't part of the previous line?". The only thing that I can't do in Python is write software for my iPhone, which bugs me a bit. But every time I try to get into Objective C I just get annoyed by the syntax and amount of cruft I have to write to do anything.