Why did Quora choose Python for its development?

[John Bokma]

Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 2:50 AM, John Bokma <john at castleamber.com> wrote:
>> Wise words. And I agree. To me Python vs. Perl has nothing to do with
>> being a fanboy (unlike many other posters here). I like both languages,
>> I have invested a lot of time in learning Python and I am really not
>> dense. Yet, even though I can program in Python sufficient enough very
>> often I just pick Perl. Now why is that?
>
> To me, a language is a tool.

To me, and to a lot of Perl programmers it's not different.

> The more tools you have competence with, the easier it will be to
> select the right one for any job. There are very few tools that have
> no use whatsoever; even Ook might be useful (although I have yet to be
> asked to port any code to OrangutanOS).  This differs from the notion
> of having ten paradigms in one language,

If this is referring to Perl: the myths surrounding "there is more than
one way" are even more crazy than "there is only one way", maybe because
"more than one" makes it so much easier to make those myths up?

On top of that: how many paradigms does Python support?  And which
paradigms does Perl support and Python doesn't?

Roughly there are two dialects of Perl [1]: what people who never took the
time to learn it write, and the rest. Also, having more than one way to
code something doesn't mean that there are no preferrences. Python has
also several ways to do certain things; yet most skilled programmers
have a preference for one way. It's not that different with Perl; in my
experience exactly the same even.

Of course one can say a lot about Perl; I can. But I have never had a
rough time reading someone else's code, unless the person had no clue
about programming to begin with [2].

If Perl is really such a disaster, why are people using it? Or are they
all short-sighted idiots who don't know better? Several Perl programmers
I know, including myself, are fully aware of Python and other
programming languages. Yet, somehow they still program in Perl...

[1] http://www.bofh.org.uk/2010/07/25/a-tale-of-two-languages
[2] I once had to port a piece of Pascal code and after some studying it
    turned out that the 100+ lines or so did some variant of bubble sort 
    and near the end reversed the order in a separate loop.

-- 
John Bokma                                                               j3b

Blog: http://johnbokma.com/        Perl Consultancy: http://castleamber.com/
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