why isn't python more popular?

[bowman]

sp00fd <sp00fdNOspSPAM at yahoo.com.invalid> wrote in message
news:0966e402.6de6df86 at usw-ex0104-031.remarq.com...
>
> Is it that white space counts?  That's really the only gripe
> that I see.

perl is a comfortable choice for *nix systems programmers, and has
been around longer, so it is back to the 'installed base' argument. In
my shop, we can use any language for internal development and
maintenance tasks, but scripts intended for client sites are written in
perl, because perl is already installed, and Python isn't.

For those people who aren't fluid in shell scripts, awk, sed, C, and
so forth Python is the logical choice. However, this description tends
to fit VB and VC programmers, many of whom haven't discovered Python
yet. Give it time.

The whitespace problem can be overcome with a decent editor, but it
certainly is not a real selling point.

CPAN is the real killer, though. Again, given time Python will catch up,
but the people look at the resources of CPAN and use perl. Once
you have learned perl, unless you like playing with languages, many
people will not bother learning a similar language where there isn't
a clear cut advantage.