A Mountain of Perl Books + Python Advocacy

[Jeff Bauer]

sp00fD wrote:
> I used perl formerly and found it to be
> sooo easy (partially because I'm a unix 
> admin and perl is very unix-like), there 
> were wonderful examples everywhere on how 
> to do things.

Why did you quit using Perl, then?  (This isn't
meant to be sarcasm. It's just that there are
plenty of opportunities available to continue 
coding in Perl.)

> Python, on the other hand, has __extremely__ 
> poor documentation (as do most languages), 
> and I believe this is a large part of why 
> perl has become so popular.  Most people 
> can't discuss theory and get coding ideas 
> from it, nor can they see a method and 
> parameters and know exactly how to use the 
> module correctly.  Frankly, the stock python
> documentation is worthless to me, and often 
> times I find myself perusing modules, without 
> luck because unfortunately most of them are
> not very well commented either.

Can you provide an example of a problem you were
unable to solve due to the poor documentation?

For the record, I used Perl before there was
any decent documentation (before the first
O'Reilly book).  Due to its similarity to
C, it was reasonably easy to figure stuff
out from the Perl man page.  However, that's
because I was already programming in C.

Even back in 1995, I found Python documentation 
to be well-written and more than adequate to 
for the tasks at hand, which included embedding 
and extending the interpreter, writing large-scale 
applications, interfacing with 3rd-party database 
engines, etc.  Also, in my experience, it has been 
easier to train non-C/Unix-geek types to program 
Python rather than Perl, though neither have 
particularly high barriers (IMO).

If you require additional assistance beyond
the stock documentation in the distribution, 
there are plenty of sources worth checking out:

http://www.python.org/psa/bookstore/

Hope this helps!

Jeff Bauer
Rubicon Research