Curtis Poe wrote: > not all of our future development should be in Python. The desktop > developer loathes Perl with a passion and would love to see it go > away. > > Does anyone know Python well enough to offer comments about whether > or not this is a reasonable move? I *love* Perl and don't want to > toss it out of my company's toolbox.
My personal opinion: While Python's indentation forcing is a nice hint to organize your source code properly (and with Perl you can produce *really* ugly code...), it can get very nasty if you mix tab and space. But typing Perl's brackets is additional keystrokes, especially on a German keyboard... I like the easy to use Perl data types over those from Python. Of course they pose certain dangers, but I know them. I cannot understand all that hubbub about strong typing, especially from the Java folks - I always use perl -wT. My biggest aversion against Python is that it allows only object-oriented programming. While OO often is the best way, sometimes the procedural approach fits better. With Perl I have the freedom to choose, with Python not. IMHO Perl is more powerful and more versatile than Python, thus I prefer Perl. Of course not everyone can handle the additional learning curve and cautionness about possible mistakes this complexity brings with it... ;=D For graphical software I use either a webserver and CGI, or Perl-Tk. If I would need more graphical playthinks I can use GTK+ with Perl (there's a Python module for it, too). Of course, arguments are not very helpful with coosing the "right" programming language, this is often rather religious. Not that I'm an exception from that... ;-P Best regards, Martin Stricker -- Homepage: http://www.martin-stricker.de/ Linux Migration Project: http://www.linux-migration.org/ Red Hat Linux 7.3 for low memory: http://www.rule-project.org/ Registered Linux user #210635: http://counter.li.org/
