Guys, I hate to say this, but I have a confession. After decades of being a staunch Perl and Ruby zealot, I confess that I… I… I love Python.
A year ago, I started my current job at a research lab where Python is the lingua franca next to C. It’s just what the actual nerds use to prototype everything. I had never written, let alone seen a line of Python before starting there.
Within my first month, I had written a utility to control web-enabled power switches, and wrote a web service to control a farm of device outlets. Woah.
I’ve also built a GUI to interact with this system. Buttons, menus, icons, events! Me, doing event-based programming! Yes!
And, recently, I’ve built a client-side daemon that runs in the background and does some important USB stuff for a virtualized automation farm. I wrote a daemon! It starts at boot and writes to syslog! And listens for Unix signals! What!
All those damned years wasted trying to shoehorn Perl into my present needs. Thanks to a fat ecosystem of modules, lots of capabilities are within reach.
I no longer feel constricted.