Why did Quora choose Python for its development?

[Thorsten Kampe]

* Steven D'Aprano (27 May 2011 03:07:30 GMT)
> Okay, I've stayed silent while people criticize me long enough. What 
> exactly did I say that was impolite? 

Nothing.

> John threw down a distinct challenge:
> 
>     if Python is really so much better than Python [sic] 
>     readability wise, why do I have such a hard time dropping
>     Perl and moving on?
> [...]
> If I got it wrong about John, oh well, I said it was a guess, and
> trying to get inside someone else's head is always a chancy business.

Why were you trying to speculate in response to such a - sorry - dumb[1] 
question? What do his personal failures to switch to Python (why did he 
even try?) have to do with whether a) Python is more readable than Perl 
and b) whether readability counts towards productivity?

/Maybe/ it is simply because he "somehow like[s] Perl more" but 
definitely that is not really relevant to the question about 
readibility.

> Or maybe I just ran into him on a bad day.

"Bad argument day". His other "Python vs Perl is like Latin vs 
Devanagari" argument is not really better. The problem with Perl is that 
it does /not/ use (Latin) alphabetic characters (like a, b, c) to form 
words but symbols ($, %, @. |, *) and re-combines them to give them new 
and special meaning.

So this is exactly /not/ a alphabet vs alphabet thing but a word(s) vs 
symbols.

Thorsten
[1] Sorry for being impolite. But "why do I...?" kind of rhetorical 
questions (as arguments) are just dumb.