[SomeCallMeTim]

>I don't really see why the "Illiterate" is necessarily a terrible programmer, though. Code is the very opposite of literature: hard to read, easy to write.

Hmm...if you're writing in Perl or PHP, maybe. Though even then a good developer can write clean code even in those languages.

I'm very much NOT a fan of Python, but one advantage of Python is it's easier to write readable code.

As to the Illiterate: It's absolutely essential to be able to read other peoples' code if you're programming on a team. It would be nice if most developers documented their code better, but since 99% of them don't document well, it's critical to be able to dive in and figure out what the other developers have done.

[jbeja]

"Python is it's easier to write readable code.", the holy grail of a programming language.

[SomeCallMeTim]

One of many, really.

My own personal favorite language -- Lua -- is also really easy to write readable code.

It also happens to run 3-100x faster than the equivalent Python, and has real coroutines. And easier C bindings.

There are other goals in programming language design than "make it pretty."