For the last year or so, on the recommendation of a dear friend, I’ve been learning to program in Python.  It’s a beautiful language, much enhanced by Mark Pilgrim’s excellent introductory text Dive Into Python, which contains many insightful observations such as the following:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

–Jamie Zawinski, in comp.emacs.xemacs