On Mar 27, 4:29 pm, neurino <lelli.l...@googlemail.com> wrote: > In the need for restructuring our daily workflow, i think it might be a > good idea to ask the Python community and hopefully initiate a thread > about pros and cons. > > We are a small group of people (approx. 10), working separetely on > their own projects (each employee manages approx. 2-3 projects). We > deal with high loads of data everyday. > > While the processing is accomplished with fortran and C programs mainly > on three systems (one cluster, two standalone IBM HPCs, 8852 and p770, > all managed by a grid-Engine), networking, pre/postprocessing, jobs > queue administration and numerical analysis have been accomplished with > Perl. > > This workflow has been flawless now for at least 15 years. New > generations of employees have been given Perl scripts and they > developed the tools further. > > If i think at the actual situation of Perl, i can't see a shiny time > ahead. Perl 6 is far to be a reliable solution, the CPAN archive is > slowing down. My idea is to persuade my colleagues to move toward > Python-based solutions. But our concerns are that, in 3-4 years from > now, the tools we are going to develop must be still scalable, > mantainable, portable and of high-performance. > > We don't have any solid in-house know-how on Python. We just have to > start everything from scracth. Where do you see advantages and > drawbacks in switching from Perl to Python, given the work picture > above? > > Thanks in advance for any opinions you might have.
Switching is always a con; see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Assuming you have that under your belt - if python is the way to go, asking on the scipy/numpy and ipython lists may give you more specific answers. - And if the 'rewrite-bug' has really got you, remember that if perl is old, C/Fortran are older. There are options today for rewriting the whole system, such as haskell and julia http://julialang.org/ WARNING: If the Spolsky warning above for perl->python is X units, take it 2X for Haskell and 4X for Julia! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
