convince me

[Andreas Kostyrka]

Am Mon, 2002-08-05 um 16.51 schrieb 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.
Well, as you seem new to this:
Theoretically, almost all languages are equivalent. They are said to be
turing complete (which means that they can be translated to the "Turing
machine").

So the discussion what you can do in a language is theoretically
nonsense.

In practice, different languages are differently efficient for different
tasks, and for different programmers.
And as efficiency is less than trivial to measure, this is highly
subjective. There are certain conclusions that are usually accepted,
like that developers write a constant number of lines per day/hour, and
so all higher level languages are more efficient to develop with.

But this allows us to put some order into your languages:
Assembler -> C -> C++ -> Java -> Perl,Python

But as others have pointed out. Just learn the languages both.
Especially as Python comes with the necessary documentation (tutorial),
so you do not to spend money on books :).

Andreas