problems with Perl; changing to Python

[Uwe Mayer]

[This followup was posted to comp.lang.python and a copy was sent to the cited author.]

Hallo,

I'm a troubled Perl programmer who's got enough of Perl and needs 
another programming language. Perhaps you can help me here.
I've got a view questions I myself cannot answer. Perhaps those of you 
who got more experience can:

Perl is great for scripts. Perl is great for programs with less than 
perhaps 200 lines. A program should be aware of its memory usage; for a 
script I don't care.

I need a language that can be used to write programs with. GUI, and 
commandline tools. When the program run in background they shouldn't 
take up more memory than necessary.
F.e. I wrote a Perl script checking for changes on homepages, expiry 
date, etc in regular intervals. This "program" is 600 lines long and 
uses 7mb of ram... too much in my oppinion.
Can I do that in Python?

I'll need to write programs which have to be extensible. The program 
may, during calculation require up to 500 mb ram. Fine with me. On the 
other hand I'll neet to write something working in background and then 
(depending on its task and size) 1-2 MB should be enough. 
What about Python here?

Installing Perl modules was a torture. I am sitting behind a firewall 
and in order to install the modules (compiling them did never work on my 
Windows 2k mashine) I had to run my own DNS server and tunnel the 
connection. Will that work better with Python? (f.e. Proxy support would 
be sufficient!)

And for the GUI programming: I used Perl/Tk previously, so Tkinter would 
be most fammiliar, I guess. What other GUI packages can Python offer me 
that will work (perhaps even in compiled .exe format) on windows 
mashines? What about features like "minimize to tray" or "always on 
top" that I wasn't able to accomplish in Perl/Tk?

I need a language where I can rely on OOP if I need to. A language where 
there's a difference between class- and instance- varriables. 
How about multiple inheritance (perl, c++) or interfaces (jave) in 
python?

Are there any applications written in Python?
Am I right here with Python or will I have to stick to a hybid C++/Java 
solution?

Thanks in advance - 
Yours
Uwe
--
C makes it easy to shoot into your foot.
C++ makes that harder, but when you do - it blows away your whole leg.