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I have two experiences telling with Perl and Python. Way back in the day, I had job doing web development in Perl. I had no say in the matter, it was the only

I have two experiences telling with Perl and Python. Way back in the day, I had job doing web development in Perl. I had no say in the matter, it was the only choice available. And I actually used Perl enough to actually like it! I mean I understand why people who like Perl really like Perl. But just a few years after that and I could hardly even read Perl code let alone try and code in it again. Python was is opposite; I never coded in Python but I ported a Python product SDK from Linux to Windows in a few weeks. I could read it. I could write it. I made more mistakes with indenting than anything else. Even to this day, I don't know Python but I can muddle my way through and be reasonably productive.

bsder 8y ago
> But just a few years after that and I could hardly even read Perl code let alone try and code in it again. Precisely this. The Perl Cookbook (and Perl Book cookbook section) was an absolute godsend in the time before the web. However, the fact that my Perl Book and Perl Cookbook fell apart from so much usage shows how the language never really stuck in my brain in spite of continuous low-level usage.
- naikrovek 8y ago
  I lost my copies of those books because I rarely needed them. Once I wrote it once, it stuck in my mind. Everyone has a language or two that really "clicks" with them. For me, one of them is Perl. Python, on the other hand, is one of those languages that won't ever stick in my mind. I don't know why. I just can't do Python. I picked up Golang in about a day. I've tried Python about 4 times over about as many years and it has gone from something I wanted to learn to something I wish never existed.
  - biomcgary 8y ago
    I had the same experience. Perl clicked for me, but not Python. A few years ago, I switched to Go for performance and it has clicked as well. Go is a rather sparse language relative to Perl (and TIMTOWTDI), so I'm a bit surprised that it was a natural switch.
  - xapata 8y ago
    Perhaps you would benefit from a good teacher. I've found that some topics I find confusing when taught by one person are obvious when taught by another.
    - reacweb 8y ago
      I had a 3 days Perl formation with an excellent teacher (17 years ago). I do not code much in perl, but when someone in the buildong has a bug in a perl script, he comes to see me. I think the perl books are not very good for a beginner because they do not focus on the most usefull parts. The ideas behind the syntax makes it easy to remember (your whole life) once you have passed the first steps of learning.
  - backtoyoujim 8y ago
    everything in python is a dictionary. That is what i needed told to start to grok it.
    - collyw 8y ago
      More or less the same as Perl and JavaScript.
  - nnq 8y ago
    There are 2 things to grok that people rarely explain to Python newbies, and which probably prevent some from building good intuition of things: 1. EVERYTHING is a DICTIONARY (including objects, despite some magic happening behind, objects are just dicts of data and functions, that are just values) 2. VARIABLES are just LABELS for things, and they only exist and can be movable around in one scope (`x = smth` inside a local scope will either create a new local label x, or move the local label x that already existed; there is no way to "move"/"create" a label outside the current scope, you can just use it to access what it's pointing to, except ugly hackery that falls back to manipulating interpreter's guts as if they are just dicts and that nobody does in real code) Once you grok this the language is quite nice and intuitive. The next step is grokking: A. operator overloading - this is something people like to avoid, but any math/physics code would easily become unreadable without this sprinkled around libraries like NumPy B. the fact that the `=` operator can be overloaded - this can really f up your mental models of things, but again, it can make math/sciency code more readable when used carefully and the people in this field (ab)use it a lot (imho it should have never existed in the language, but we all have opinions) C. everything can behave like function (which btw are first class things in Python) by just implementing __call__, another apparent trivia but it changes the shape of APIs a lot (eg. "have class instance also behave like a function and have it passable as an argument to something that expects a callback") D. multiple inheritance - yeah, it exists in Python and it's maybe a bit ugly, but in fact it's what allows you to implement Mixins and other sugared-compositional patterns, actually reducing your total use of inheritance and the length of inheritance chains a lot (IMO multiple inheritance is the only things that saves inheritance from itself, and you shouldn't ever have I. without MI. but people seldom agree with me on this :P) To be honest I still profoundly dislike Python as a language, but when most of your job is reading other people's code... you come to appreciate it more than other dynamic langs :)
    - mikorym 8y ago
      > everything in Python is a dictionary This is new to me, but probably will be useful. Everything in R is a vector (or if you like, array). This is what makes R fast if your objective is not program development, but dissemination of information. I wonder what should be said of Perl, but the only thing I can think of is every input should rather be a string.
nightfly 8y ago
Tangentially... My organization maintains a couple of Perl web apps for internal purposes (one that dates back starting in 1997). We do some occasional work/improvements/modernizations on these. Mentally switching into "perl" mode to work on these projects requires tons more effort then switching between our other Bash/PHP/Puppet/Python codebases. And there are several sections of the code I've shied away from modernizing because they use esoteric perl operators that I don't use and don't really understand. Not to mention that only a few members of our organization are really "fluent" in perl, and teaching it to the newbies feels almost like a waste of resources when they can be more productive faster using python which has ample modern documentation and simpler syntax/conventions and well defined coding standards.
- ryl00 8y ago
  > Mentally switching into "perl" mode to work on these projects requires tons more effort then switching between our other Bash/PHP/Puppet/Python That's surprising to me. Bash, PHP and perl seem to be closer to each other than any of them are to python. For example, the use of sigils ($var) for variable names in Bash/PHP/perl.
  - mikorym 8y ago
    I would agree. Maybe it's more because of what people are used to than the objective "distance" between them.
  - dotancohen 8y ago
    Bash / PHP / Perl superficially look like each other. Python code looks different. But Perl has many strange operators and conventions that do not do as expected, or are foreign to the point of being unreadable to those who don't use Perl regularly. Additionally, Perl can be made concise (one-liner) to the point of being unreadable. It's been said that Perl is a write-only language for a reason. Contrast with Python, which I've had six-year-olds tell me what a program does after only a few minutes' introduction to Python syntax. Though to be fair, Python's List Comprehensions are in fact just as unreadable as Perl is.
collyw 8y ago
Having used both languages for maybe 7 years each, you can write unreadable code in both. I have seen some absolute disasters in Python, its really about the skill and motivation of the developer to produce readable code. Perl has a lot more syntax which makes it harder for people who don't know Perl, but if you know the language I don't think its inherently worse.

bsder 8y ago

> But just a few years after that and I could hardly even read Perl code let alone try and code in it again. Precisely this. The Perl Cookbook (and Perl Book cookbook section) was an absolute godsend in the time before the web. However, the fact that my Perl Book and Perl Cookbook fell apart from so much usage shows how the language never really stuck in my brain in spite of continuous low-level usage.

naikrovek 8y ago
I lost my copies of those books because I rarely needed them. Once I wrote it once, it stuck in my mind. Everyone has a language or two that really "clicks" with them. For me, one of them is Perl. Python, on the other hand, is one of those languages that won't ever stick in my mind. I don't know why. I just can't do Python. I picked up Golang in about a day. I've tried Python about 4 times over about as many years and it has gone from something I wanted to learn to something I wish never existed.
- biomcgary 8y ago
  I had the same experience. Perl clicked for me, but not Python. A few years ago, I switched to Go for performance and it has clicked as well. Go is a rather sparse language relative to Perl (and TIMTOWTDI), so I'm a bit surprised that it was a natural switch.
- xapata 8y ago
  Perhaps you would benefit from a good teacher. I've found that some topics I find confusing when taught by one person are obvious when taught by another.
  - reacweb 8y ago
    I had a 3 days Perl formation with an excellent teacher (17 years ago). I do not code much in perl, but when someone in the buildong has a bug in a perl script, he comes to see me. I think the perl books are not very good for a beginner because they do not focus on the most usefull parts. The ideas behind the syntax makes it easy to remember (your whole life) once you have passed the first steps of learning.
- backtoyoujim 8y ago
  everything in python is a dictionary. That is what i needed told to start to grok it.
  - collyw 8y ago
    More or less the same as Perl and JavaScript.
- nnq 8y ago
  There are 2 things to grok that people rarely explain to Python newbies, and which probably prevent some from building good intuition of things: 1. EVERYTHING is a DICTIONARY (including objects, despite some magic happening behind, objects are just dicts of data and functions, that are just values) 2. VARIABLES are just LABELS for things, and they only exist and can be movable around in one scope (`x = smth` inside a local scope will either create a new local label x, or move the local label x that already existed; there is no way to "move"/"create" a label outside the current scope, you can just use it to access what it's pointing to, except ugly hackery that falls back to manipulating interpreter's guts as if they are just dicts and that nobody does in real code) Once you grok this the language is quite nice and intuitive. The next step is grokking: A. operator overloading - this is something people like to avoid, but any math/physics code would easily become unreadable without this sprinkled around libraries like NumPy B. the fact that the `=` operator can be overloaded - this can really f up your mental models of things, but again, it can make math/sciency code more readable when used carefully and the people in this field (ab)use it a lot (imho it should have never existed in the language, but we all have opinions) C. everything can behave like function (which btw are first class things in Python) by just implementing __call__, another apparent trivia but it changes the shape of APIs a lot (eg. "have class instance also behave like a function and have it passable as an argument to something that expects a callback") D. multiple inheritance - yeah, it exists in Python and it's maybe a bit ugly, but in fact it's what allows you to implement Mixins and other sugared-compositional patterns, actually reducing your total use of inheritance and the length of inheritance chains a lot (IMO multiple inheritance is the only things that saves inheritance from itself, and you shouldn't ever have I. without MI. but people seldom agree with me on this :P) To be honest I still profoundly dislike Python as a language, but when most of your job is reading other people's code... you come to appreciate it more than other dynamic langs :)
  - mikorym 8y ago
    > everything in Python is a dictionary This is new to me, but probably will be useful. Everything in R is a vector (or if you like, array). This is what makes R fast if your objective is not program development, but dissemination of information. I wonder what should be said of Perl, but the only thing I can think of is every input should rather be a string.

nightfly 8y ago

Tangentially... My organization maintains a couple of Perl web apps for internal purposes (one that dates back starting in 1997). We do some occasional work/improvements/modernizations on these. Mentally switching into "perl" mode to work on these projects requires tons more effort then switching between our other Bash/PHP/Puppet/Python codebases. And there are several sections of the code I've shied away from modernizing because they use esoteric perl operators that I don't use and don't really understand. Not to mention that only a few members of our organization are really "fluent" in perl, and teaching it to the newbies feels almost like a waste of resources when they can be more productive faster using python which has ample modern documentation and simpler syntax/conventions and well defined coding standards.

ryl00 8y ago
> Mentally switching into "perl" mode to work on these projects requires tons more effort then switching between our other Bash/PHP/Puppet/Python That's surprising to me. Bash, PHP and perl seem to be closer to each other than any of them are to python. For example, the use of sigils ($var) for variable names in Bash/PHP/perl.
- mikorym 8y ago
  I would agree. Maybe it's more because of what people are used to than the objective "distance" between them.
- dotancohen 8y ago
  Bash / PHP / Perl superficially look like each other. Python code looks different. But Perl has many strange operators and conventions that do not do as expected, or are foreign to the point of being unreadable to those who don't use Perl regularly. Additionally, Perl can be made concise (one-liner) to the point of being unreadable. It's been said that Perl is a write-only language for a reason. Contrast with Python, which I've had six-year-olds tell me what a program does after only a few minutes' introduction to Python syntax. Though to be fair, Python's List Comprehensions are in fact just as unreadable as Perl is.

collyw 8y ago

Having used both languages for maybe 7 years each, you can write unreadable code in both. I have seen some absolute disasters in Python, its really about the skill and motivation of the developer to produce readable code. Perl has a lot more syntax which makes it harder for people who don't know Perl, but if you know the language I don't think its inherently worse.