Why did Quora choose Python for its development?

[Thorsten Kampe]

* John Bokma (Wed, 25 May 2011 07:01:07 -0500)
> Thorsten Kampe <thorsten at thorstenkampe.de> writes:
> > * Chris Angelico (Wed, 25 May 2011 08:01:38 +1000)
> >> 
> >> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 3:39 AM, D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy at druid.net> wrote:
> >> > One of my favorite quotes (not sure if it was about Perl or APL) is 
> > "I
> >> > refuse to use a programming language where the proponents of it stick
> >> > snippets under each other's nose and say 'I bet you can't guess what
> >> > this does.'"
> >> 
> >> Yes, I believe that was Perl. And an amusing quote. But most of the
> >> point of it comes from the fact that Perl uses punctuation for most of
> >> its keywords, whereas (say) Python uses English words; it's a lot more
> >> fun to crunch something down when you can use $| and friends than when
> >> you have to put "x and y", complete with spaces, for a simple boolean.
> >> But that says nothing about which language is actually better for
> >> working with... [...]
> >
> > It does say something about readibility. And yes, "readability counts". 
> > And yes, readability says a lot about how good a language is for reading 
> > and working with.
> 
> To people used to the latin alphabet languages using a different script
> are unreadable. So readability has a lot to do with what one is used
> to.

You've made that "alphabet" argument more than once. Nevertheless it's 
nonsense (sorry). Perl uses the same alphabet as Python. Only the 
"words" Perl uses ("$|" for instance) are only found in a Perl 
dictionary not in a English or math dictionary like the one that Python 
uses.

That's why you can /read/ Python but you have to /decode/ Perl to 
understand the source code.

> Like I already stated before: if Python is really so much better than
> Python readability wise, why do I have such a hard time dropping Perl
> and moving on?

What kind of argument is that?

Thorsten