Today we went to a sing along Sound of Music at the Castro Theatre. Sara’s parents came, and we brought the kids, too. It was really fun, although the movie is a bit long. Afterwards, we went to SOMA Streat Food. I had meatballs from our friend Adam’s truck. We brought some meatballs home, and I’m afraid I overate a little. But no matter. I’ll run it off tomorrow.
I’m learning Python for work. I’ve been asked to take on an existing project that is written in Python, and I have never worked in that language before. I’m keen to learn it, nevertheless. I realize that I have an internal hierarchy of programming languages, maybe something like a class system. It’s totally subjective and a bit dynamic. JavaScript, for example, used to be very un-classy, and has been gaining in the rankings over the past several years. Node.js certainly doesn’t hurt, but also, people seem to care a lot more about front end development now than they used to.
This class system explains to me why, when I interviewed a few years ago at companies using Perl, I cringed at the thought of going back to Perl, a language I had happily worked in during the late 90s and early 00s. You don’t want to go down the class hierarchy. You want to maintain your position or move up.
Anyway, Python is up there. At least as high as, if not somewhat higher than, Ruby, the language I’ve been working in for several years. I certainly don’t cringe at the idea of working in Python. Looking at some of the programming language popularity rankings, it seems as though Python is definitely in the top ten, so it’s worth knowing for that as well.