On Wed, 9 Oct 2002, Curtis Poe wrote: > I have no significant problems with Python, per se, but one of our > developers is doing desktop client development work in Python and we > may be switching a server, currently written in Perl, to Python. In > general, there seems to be a bit of a Python Good, Perl Bad movement > starting here at work.
That's a bit harsh. I find the whole Perl-Python rivalry more than a little bit silly. The languages have starkly different syntaxes, but semantically they're much more similar than different. My opinion is that the two can happily co-exist in any moderately big organization. A lot of Perl people chafe at Python's relatively stricter structure, but come on, it's not like we're talking about Cobol or assembler here. The language is still pretty damned flexible, and in this case one person's straightjacket is another's steady foundation. In my opinion, Python's two zingers are Zope -- which, as powerful as mod_perl is, is like the difference between, well, assembler one hand & $scripting_language on the other -- and the language's interactive mode, which makes it very easy to test code on the fly. Yes, you can do some of that in Perl, but it's just not as slick IMO. Also, of the little bit I've used the languages on Win32, the interface between Python & COM seems a little bit nicer to me -- I was able to get Python code to drive Excel pretty easily to do some neat tricks that, CPAN libraries like Spreadsheet::ParseExcel & Spreadsheet::WriteExcel notwithstanding, just didn't feel as nice in Perl, personally. I welcome updates if Win32 Perl is getting better now, certainly I realize that there are a lot of good uses for it (I've read Dave Roth's books). That said, personally I still like Perl's "fit" better, and use it far more often when I need to script something. For a lot of the problems that I would want to solve programmatically, my instinct is generally to think in morr Perl-ish terms when coming up with a solution. This is not least because, at this point, Perl can pretty reliably be found as part of the default install on any platform I'll have to deal with (OSX, Red Hat, Solaris, SuSE, IRIX). As Python gets more popuar, maybe the same will be true of it some day, but at this point the lingua franca is Perl. Still, I wouldn't want to have to choose -- forcing one or the other is IMO almost always a false dilemma. If your company were to really go all Python for new major development, would they rip /usr/bin/perl out of everything, and rewrite all the 100s of system & local scripts that use it? Of course not. Would they try to ban using that /usr/bin/perl when it could easily solve new problems? What would be the point? My hope is that Parrot will eventually short circuit the whole debate by serving as an engine for both languages & allowing each to take advantage of the best features of the other. The two communities have more to gain by pooling their talents than by bickering with each other, especially when there are *really* nasty languages to snap people out of: Java, VB, PHP, and so on. .NOT :) -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED]
