I downvoted you because that was a trollish comment that added nothing to the discussion and seemed designed to encourage vitriol. The fact is you could substitute pretty much any mainstream language in that statement and it would still be true and still be a troll. People don't want to abandon skills they worked hard to learn just because someone else learned something different. This is true whether that person is a partisan of java, ruby, javascript, python or StandardML.

What, you think I'm willing to use anything else ever since I read this? http://www.amazon.com/ML-Working-Programmer-Larry-Paulson/dp...

You sound like a Pet Technologist!

/me looks at the parts of the cat cam on his workbench, glances at the machine mining dogecoin in the rack next to it .

You may have a point.

>I don't really see why the "Illiterate" is necessarily a terrible programmer, though. Code is the very opposite of literature: hard to read, easy to write.

Hmm...if you're writing in Perl or PHP, maybe. Though even then a good developer can write clean code even in those languages.

I'm very much NOT a fan of Python, but one advantage of Python is it's easier to write readable code.

As to the Illiterate: It's absolutely essential to be able to read other peoples' code if you're programming on a team. It would be nice if most developers documented their code better, but since 99% of them don't document well, it's critical to be able to dive in and figure out what the other developers have done.

"Python is it's easier to write readable code.", the holy grail of a programming language.

One of many, really.

My own personal favorite language -- Lua -- is also really easy to write readable code.

It also happens to run 3-100x faster than the equivalent Python, and has real coroutines. And easier C bindings.

There are other goals in programming language design than "make it pretty."

Someone has a chip on their shoulder about Python.

Not really. I've used Python extensively, it's just an overbearing tendency I've subjectively noticed amongst certain recent programmers.

Are you referring to "Python programmers? Some people specialize, you know, not to mention that a reader could read between the lines of your post and think that you might be fighting for more platform spread in a Python shop. "You dummies don't understand, Rust would be so good for this!"