Looking for a scripting language

[Ian Bicking]

On Sat, 2002-05-04 at 22:35, Peter Hansen wrote:
> Perl and Python are your only serious alternatives (from that list).
> Those in this newsgroup would widely consider Python to be a
> big improvement over Perl in the area of readability and maintainability.
> Perl programs tend to be very difficult to read for others, or even the
> original programmer, weeks or months after they are written.  It's
> also fairly widely considered to be inadequate for large programs,
> whereas Python is highly capable in this regard.

In the scope that we're looking at -- scripting languages -- I think the
big plus for Python is that it's predictable (which relates to scalable
and maintainable).  When you write something, it will usually act like
you expect it to.  Perl always surprises me, and I get the impression
that this does not go away even with a lot of experience.  I've also
been doing less and less shell scripting for this same reason -- it
works most of the time, but then in some corner case it goes haywire
(e.g., a space in a filename).

This in turns leads to "it fits in your brain", one of the most
important things Python got right (and Zope totally threw away, but
that's another issue entirely).

  Ian