All in all, language choice boils down to the programmer. I'm happy for
others to hate perl, and love python. I know they're wrong, and that's all
that matters.
I am an old programmer who began in BASIC some 15 years ago and moved on to structuring spaghetti code in to something more palletable with QBasic.
As an example take "Amazing" from the BASIC Computer Games book. It's an unholy mess of goto statements but with some creative computing you can untangle the worst of messes so there's nary a goto statement anywhere with virtually no additional flags required.
Anyway, roll forward a few years and find me learning Pascal, Matlab, and a couple of others at Uni, roll forward another year and I'm enjoying far more coding in C and dabbling my toes in C++ but unimpressed with the patched on OO layer, whereupon I dabble in assembly language and spend lots of time at Fravias sites hacking merrily away (mostly successfully) at anything that came past.
Cue diversion into websites and photoshop and no further programming for too many years due to finding a life, and you have me as I am now.
The point of all this is, given the stated background in programming, which is better for me. Perl or Python. If Perl then how would you teach me enough of it so I am proficient enough to run about creating havoc with my own code?
-- Paul Wilkins
