From: bmcd at es.co.nz (Ben Caradoc-Davies)
Date: 29 Apr 1999 22:51:19 GMT
Subject: Python and Perl (was: converting perl to python)
Message-ID: <slrn7ihopk.js.bmcd@ripley.sulaco.net>
Content-Length: 2179
X-UID: 649                                                  

[This is not intended to start another pointless language war. Well, at least
not between Perlers and Pythonistas.  :-)  ]

On Thu, 29 Apr 1999 20:29:45 +0300, Moshe Zadka <moshez at math.huji.ac.il> wrote:
>I wonder if Randal came here (2 messages in this group) to spread the
>regular Perl propaganda (summarized by "This language is icky because
>programmers are icky")....
>Randal, while I'm sure you're a good guy, and I liked ``Learning Perl'',
>most of us at c.l.py heard more about Perl then we'll ever want to --
>in fact, I think many of us moved to Python from Perl, and never looked
>back. (Or we'd turn into salt)
>(And hey, Randal, when you wake up and start using Python, I'm sure you'll
>be one of the best c.l.py posters <0.5 wink>)

Hmm ... Randal did have a rather Python-friendly .sig ... I would be reluctant
to start hassling him.

I think that between Tom C. and Randal, some of the nicest things that I have
heard said about Python have come from Perlers.

In my opinion, Perl is one of the best things Python has going for it;
1)	Perl has, because of it's extreme usefulness, very deep "market
	penetration" (ugh, I'm sounding like a suit).
2)	Perl has established the credibility of dynamically typed high level
	languages (I'm trying to stamp out the term "scripting languages")
	for general purpose programming.
3)	The nice people in c.l.p.m mention Python from time to time, and point
	people in the right direction. And then there's Tom C's web page 
	comparing Perl and Python.

Perl is a fertile breeding ground for Pythonistas. I'm sure many expand into
Python from Perl. But Perlers never forget their roots. Some things are just
too succint in perl to do any other way.

e.g. deformatting a document, when you need extended regex and text which sed
can't handle;

perl -e "while(<>){s/\s/\n/g;print;}" file1.txt > temp1.txt
perl -e "while(<>){s/\s/\n/g;print;}" file2.txt > temp2.txt
diff temp1.txt temp2.txt

And this was on a machine which didn't have python (yet!). Even if it had, I
would have still used perl.

Perl is going to be around for a long time. This is a very good thing for
Python.

-- 
Ben Caradoc-Davies <bmcd at es.co.nz>




