More Python

Some more thoughts on Python...

The fact that there don't seem to be any adjectives in the language is a bit wierd: as a Perl programmer, I'd expect to be able to declare a variable as local (I go back to Perl 4) or my, but nothing equivalent in python.

Declaring static methods is wonky, but at least they are there, so I can make Singletons.

For those of you who haven't read Design Patterns, a Singleton is a way to implement classes that you only load once. For instance, when the startup costs for the object are very expensive. In my case I'm doing a dozen or so nasty, full table-scan (on hundreds of thousands or millions of rows) SQL queries. You might guess I want to do this as few times as possible. :)

Anyhow, the lambda expressions and first class functions more than make up for it. Very nice.