convince me

[Kyle Babich]

Well, I'm 15 years old looking to have a future in programming.  I've
been playing around with the basics of a few different languages (C,
C++, Perl, Python, and Java).  I know I want to learn C, but as far as
perl and python I'm trying to decide which.  I know right now perl can
be considered more marketable, but I also like python because it looks
to be growing and to have a good future.  But I started to learn perl
before I found python (from another perl developer ironically).  I was
wondering if there was anything that can be done in python that can't
be done in perl.

On Mon, 5 Aug 2002 15:46:08 +0200, "holger krekel"
<pyth at devel.trillke.net> said:
> Kyle Babich wrote:
> > I started learning perl but more recently I found python.  Both look
> > to have their advantages, so I'm having a hard time picking one to
> > stick with and persue.  I have seen arguments that python has cleaner
> > syntax, is gaining in popularity, with excellent documentation, and is
> > better for group projects, which is all fairly obvious.  But (from a
> > _neutral_ standpoint I am asking) what can python do that perl can't?
> 
> perl and python (and tcl and ruby for that matter) are all very
> powerful languages. They *all* have a large and excellent repository 
> of libaries/code you can reuse (Web, Images, Numerics, Networks ...). 
> 
> Python does for me ...
> 
> - provide most readable code
> 
> - avoids bloat of syntax-gimmicks (line-noise) compared especially to
> perl 
> 
> - leads you to express ideas at higher levels.
>   (I program since 15 years an no other language allowed me
>   to do reusable (OO-) patterns as easily.)
> 
> - provides a clean C-API (in case you need to do big-scale
>   optimization).  A long-time perl-hacker just recently 
>   told me that the perl C-code is ?!"@?;§)(!
> 
> - has a challenging, knowledgable and nice news-group (c.l.py :-)
> 
> For any further comments i'd first like to hear a little bit
> of your background (which languages do you know already if any)
> and goals (what stuff would you like to do).
> 
>     holger
> 

--
Kyle