Re: gdb scripting language (was OSX crash)

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Carsten Mattner writes:

 > [Python is] only made popular due to being the new Perl of the
 > Linux distros.

I'm not sure exactly what your sentence referred to, but if the edit
above it correctly reflects your intent, your statement is false.
There are excellent reasons why Python is the scripting language
chosen by most distros that have made such a choice recently.  Those
reasons don't necessarily apply to an extension language, of course,
and we should be careful about that distinction.  However, I do find
some of the features of Python such as iterators, comprehensions, and
occasionally even generators to be useful at the interpreter prompt,
so I suspect they would be similarly useful if Python were used as an
extension language.

Of course the other scripting languages you mention are of similar
power, but I don't find them any easier to learn than I found Python
(and I've learned several languages since I learned Python; I should
be better at it now!)  There's an advantage to having one language
popular enough that you only need to learn that one, which gives
Python a substantial edge on the others (except Perl, of course).

It's also true that I find them all harder to learn than I found
forgetting Perl, but that, of course, is praising with faint damns.

 > Python being in lldb is one of problems FreeBSD faces with putting
 > LLDB in the base system.

If you say so, I'll take your word for it.  Nevertheless, Lisps face
far more resistance from the average member of the free software
community and the broader (or if you prefer, "neighboring") open
source community.

This *is* a problem for Emacs, and I think Lispers (and advocates of
functional languages in general) could learn a lot from the success of
Python.