My favorite language is Python. I am partial to it for several reasons, but mainly because Python source is easy to write and easy to read. I have always disliked C/C++ and derivatives languages such as Java because they are, for me anyway, a chore to work with.

For whatever reason, I have a tendency not to see punctuation marks when I am writing. It's a trivial thing, but I would spend a half hour trying to track down a missing { in Java. The languages themselves make sense, but for me anyway, they just weren't much fun to work with. I'd spend more time debugging a program or trying to figure out some external library than I would working on whatever problem I was trying to solve.

I like Python particularly for its versatility. I could use it as a command-line tool in one instance, a standalone app in another, or as a web script in another. Other languages can do this, but it seemed especially easy to do this with Python. I've used it to build a lot of useful little apps, for example, a Spanish flashcard program that I use to memorize vocabulary. I also like it because it is as close to procedural code as you can get. Anytime I needed to build a small utility of some sort, it was a great choice, unless I wanted to do something like talk to a database, or distribute something for use on other peoples' computers.

When I started my most recent venture, I really wanted to use Python for most of our applications. It's easy to read, runs on everything, and because of that, is cheap to support. The problem is that to do anything useful, you invariably need to talk to a database, and that's where Python falls flat on its face. I am not picking Python out for abuse here; it's what I've worked with the most. And in any case, my critique of current programming tools applies across the board.

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