On 30/12/16 08:59, Maarten wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Saw this discussion and found it interesting, got a somewhat half on
> topic question. I've been trying to decide on a language to learn,
> python and perl both stood out. There seems to be various discussions of
> why one is better than the other, and the pro's and con's of both. From
> what I've seen perl has been around longer than python and there are
> plenty of places to ask for help and lots of perl modules to use in your
> code. Python on the other hand seems newer, also has modules(probably
> less than perl), and has quite bit of community around too. However
> lately I've been seeing that there are more python projects than perl,
> making me think python might be the better one to go for. So I am more
> wondering what peoples opinions on this mailing list are when it comes
> to python or perl, that way I can consider the opinion of people who
> have been programming for a while before I make a decision to what I am
> going to do ;)

I've worked with both Perl and Python professionally.  I will not say
that I was very good with Perl, but I could make it work reasonably
well.  But my experience with Python was that I got up-to-speed way
faster than with Perl.

Another thing I like about Python is that it is possible to write hard
core performance needing components in C, which is loaded as Python
modules.  Something similar might be be possible with Perl too, but I
have no experience with it.

With that said, I would write a program depending heavily on processing
text and regex, then I would most likely consider Perl for that project
if I would have time to refresh my Perl skills.  Otherwise I would
choose Python, as it is to me quite easy to get started quickly there.

So to me, Perl vs Python is depending just as much of the needs of a new
project.  Both have merits, but since everything isn't a nail, neither
of them are the uniform hammer which works perfect for all occasions.

With all that said, for most of my use cases, Python have been a
reasonably good alternative.


-- 
kind regards,

David Sommerseth