Oh, I found Java too verbose and Sun’s bloody licensing scheme was annoying. Now, Microsoft’s .NET is taking over where it left off. C/C++ was kool, but very macho and, damn, did you have to do lots of debugging to get anything running properly. Screw that. Besides, I’d rather use Borland’s Delphi, which is the souped up re-incarnation of Turbo Pascal. Heck, the executable code runs just as fast or faster than C/C++…and it’s smaller too. No sh!t dudes. Betcha didn’t know that.

Enter Python
Now, if you’ve been living in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan, then you probably will not have a clue about the Python programming language, which is truly a secret weapon in many IT shops around the planet. Trust me on that one. I wrote about it here, so I won’t bother reinventing the wheel.

Anyhow, I think it’d be a great language for peeps here in Africa to learn instead of that crappy outdated VB6 language they’re still teaching in most of these IT (ahem!) schools. Buyer beware. Oh, Python’s creator, Guido van Rossum, now works for Google, which is now the most admired company on the planet. What does that say about them and their committment to being #1? Everything. And the official Python mascot is such a cutie. Don’t you agree?

Python jobs on the rise…
According to this blurb on the Oreilly Radar , Python jobs are on the rise. Take a peek at this:

O’Reilly editor Sarah Milstein writes: “My brother, a Python geek who attended PyCon last week, reports that it was hiring fest: ‘at PyCon: *everyone* was hiring. I was asked if I would be interested in moving to 2-3 cities for a job, just in casual conversation. Half the lightning talks ended (or started) with “We’re hiring”. Which was pretty deeply reassuring.’” This information is consistent with our analysis of the online book and job markets. Ruby has more momentum among startups, but Python is also a hot startup language, and is becoming one of the officially sanctioned licenses at many larger companies. For example, it is one of the three “official” languages at Google (C++, Java, and Python)

Wow! Isn’t that totally AMAZING? The beauty about Python programming is that the language is simpy a joy to use. It’s easy to read…not cryptic at all, and powerfull as hell. You can create desktop apps, web apps, networking apps, use it as your middleware stack, write commercial video games, use it on your mobile device. It simply is the chameleon of programming languages, and that’s why I think more people here in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Kigali, Lagos, Cape Town, Kampala et al should be USING it. Say goodbye to VB6 and Java for heavens sakes.

Thanks Eiwot…
I’m a member of the Ottawa Python Author’s Group so I get a lot of emails on what’s going down in the world of Python. Here’s some info from Eiwot – a member:

Hi all,
I created new blog about Python programming and Python Articles at http://pyarticles.blogspot.com. Let’s check it out

Cheers

Damn, everybody’s using Blogger/BlogSpot eh? I guess Google can’t keep a good thing under wraps (secret) for too long. Anyhow, I urge you to peek his blog. I’m quite impressed with his posts so far.

Happy computing.

Here’s a nice book review. You see, I’m eager to take full advantage of the web by using web services as my secret weapon to create powerful applications. This should definitely bring in the big bucks.

Web services enable the same evolution that COM did, with a twist. Web services are indi-vidual units of programming logic that exist on a web server. They can be easily integrated into all sorts of applications, including everything from other ASP.NET applications to simple command-line applications. The twist is that, unlike COM, which is a platform-specific standard, web services are built on a foundation of open standards. These stan-dards allow web services to be created with .NET but consumed on other platforms—or vice versa. In fact, the idea of web services didn’t originate at Microsoft. Other major computer forces such as IBM helped to develop the core standards that Microsoft uses natively in ASP.NET.

The root standard for all the individual web service standards is XML. Because XML is text-based, web service invocations can pass over normal HTTP channels. Other distributed object technologies, such as DCOM, are much more complex, and as a result, they are exceedingly difficult to configure correctly, especially if you need to use them over the Internet. So not only are web services governed by cross-platform standards, but they’re also easier to use.

You can look at web services in two ways. Application programmers (and the .NET Framework) tend to treat a web service as a set of methods that you can call over the Internet. Of course, these methods have all the capabilities that ASP.NET programmers are used to, such as the automatic security and session state facilities discussed in other parts of this book. XML gurus take a different perspective. They prefer to treat web ser-vices as a way to exchange XML messages.

Which perspective you take depends to some extent on the type of web service you are creating. For example, if you need to pass messages through several intermediaries as part of a long-running business-to-business transaction, you’ll have an easier time looking at your web service as a message-passing system. On the other hand, if you’re calling a web service just to get some information—such as a product catalog or stock quote—you’ll probably treat it like any other useful function. {source: Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 in C#: From Novice to Professional ; pg. 815}