Tom Metro wrote: > I recently listened to: > > Guido van Rossum: Building an Open Source Project and Community > http://cdn.itconversations.com/ITC.SDF-GuidoVanRossum.1-2005.02.17.mp3 > http://cdn.itconversations.com/ITC.SDF-GuidoVanRossum.2-2005.02.17.mp3 > > and I still don't get what's so compelling about Python. > > Guido made comparisons to Perl only in two areas - saying he likes > generators and iterators better than continuations, and essentially > saying he prefers the aesthetics of Python over Perl. > > Supporting the latter he told a tale of a Perl script he used to manage > the Python mailing list, which kept breaking, and he felt it was > unmaintainable, so he switched to an initially less capable mailing list > manager written in Python by a co-worker (which eventually evolved into > GNU Mailman). > > Early in the talk he showed disgust towards a prevalent attitude that > Python isn't a real language, and that corporations prefer to use Java > and C++ for real applications. Then later he quotes some market research > firm that essentially says the same thing, but this time saying that > Perl was not maintainable for anything larger than a script, but Python > was. To echo that without any qualifiers seems to show an ignorance of > modern Perl development. Something he shouldn't have, given his > involvement in the scripting language community, which includes > attending conferences that cover languages other than Python. He even > says he's friends with Larry Wall. > > What's worse is that when he discusses the internals of the language, he > describes things like the way objects were glued-on well after the > language was conceived, very unlike Ruby, and very much like Perl. There > were several examples of things like this that sounded no better than > the warts on Perl, just different. > > Does a preference for Python just come down to personal taste, without > any real objective, technical benefits? If so, I hope the Perl 6 > developers have remembered to run the language through a "pretty" > filter. :-) Or maybe added a "use Enterprise" pragma that forces all > code to be consistently indented in order to avoid a fatal syntax error. :-) > > -Tom > > I have been looking into python because I saw a course on beginning programming using python. I am going to use this to introduce my son to programming. As far as I can tell, the readability of the code is the only advantage for python over perl. At least for what I am doing, I cannot see that python does anything perl doesn't do. I am still more comfortable with the perl syntax.
Jerry _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
