I've been programming computers for over two decades now, half of them full time. It all started in 1979 with an arcade game, "Head On 2", that spurred my interest in computers, and my desire to tame them. After dabbling with Basic programs from magazine articles, I went to university, where I learnt Pascal Modula-2. I got to use the last punch cards, quickly supplanted by MS-DOS; I received no Unix exposure there, unfortunately.
Meanwhile the eighties had flown into the nineties, I had graduated, and had started to work at a great place, where I ran head-on (heh) into Unix, the C language, and (shudder) vi. It all seemed powerful technology to me, but it felt like it took fair amounts of arcane wizardry to master it all.
At mid nineties the firm undertook a massive migration to the C++ language. Meanwhile, the system administrator job got vacant, and I took the opportunity to explore the inner working of computers and networks. Alas, I made a big mistake: I let myself be seduced by the Dark Side. On my suggestion, the firm switched the PC networking from Novell to Windows NT (while the Unix workstations kept humming with superiority). There began five dreadful years of daily cursing, and feelings of impotence, that prepared me for the rise of FLOSS.
By 1998 I was sick and tired of opaque, non-working stuff, and was ready to open my arms to Linux and the open source world. At the same time I was tired of playing computer mechanic, and yearned to go back to full time programming, but I felt the need of a programming language somewhat more modern and higher-level than C.
I devoured all 1100 pages of "Thinking in Java", and yet I was not won over: Java felt too verbose and rigid, and it was not open source anyway.
I tiresomely slogged through "Learning Perl"; at the end I was sick, went to the bathroom and puked. (I still keep the book under lock and key: I would not give it to my worst enemy, and I loathe burning it, the toxins would contaminate the environment for centuries.)
In 1999 I needed to do some web programming, and encountered Zope. Looking under the covers I found a peculiar, clean little language: Python. At first, I was a little dubious about the significant indentation, but the brilliance of the concept quickly manifested itself. I went on studying the "Learning Python" book, and I could hardly believe it, I was laughing with joy at each other page: it was love at first sight.
I've been using Python on my job since then, almost all the time, and I feel lucky and privileged of being able to do so. Thank you, Guido, and all the wonderful Python people!
