A Mountain of Perl Books + Python Advocacy

[thehaas at my-deja.com]

In article <20000405053920.20579.qmail at web2102.mail.yahoo.com>,
  lewst <lewst at yahoo.com> wrote:
[snip]
> What is it about Perl that makes it so much more popular and have such
> a huge grassroots swell?  I personally find Perl an abomination and
> Python a breath of fresh air.  Perl has that first mover advantage I
> suppose, but should that really make such a hugh difference?

If you use Unix, Perl is easy to learn and you can write fairly powerful
scripts in a short amount of time.  Remember that Perl was basically
designed for system administration tasks, not necessarily for an
all-purpose language.  Sys Admins generally don't care how the
script/programs work, they just need something simple and need it
written fast.

One of my good friends is happens to be one of the biggest
language-bigots in the world.  I had been telling him for a long time
that he needed to try Python out, that he would like it (He was using
PHP and C++ before).  He refused, saying that he didn't want to be tied
down by the whitespace and that he didn't approve of how Python did
object-oriented stuff (I don't know why).  At this time, I wasn't that
serious about Python, but knew that he would like it (since he considers
Perl a freak of nature that should be avoided).  Well, he finally got
tired of PHP and C++ (I think the three days he spend trying to put in a
tree into PHP and failing did it) and bought Learning Python.  Now he
loves Python - I have never heard him say this many good things about
any programming language.  However, for the record, the whitespace
bothers him and he thinks how Python does object-oriented things is
weird, but he loves it and will not use anything else.  This got me more
serious about Python, so I bought Learning Python and am hooked (but I
haven't rewritten a lot of my Perl stuff yet, since most of the my Perl
things work well and I hate looking at Perl code).

The moral of the story: even if you are a language bigot, you will still
love Python.  So what isn't it more popular?  Who says it isn't popular?
 Perl has been out longer, but we are also seeing places move from Perl
to Python (or something else) because they don't want to maintain Perl
programs that are quickly becoming way too convolted.  Python is much,
much cleaner and is very easy to write programs in.  I predict that we
will see an expontential increase in Python use/awareness in the coming
months.  IMHO, it will be because of Perl and it's weaknesses.

- mikeh



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