4 ms·

Python is too good a language not to have made it. Google endorsement helped a lot, but they chose it because it's great.

by jergosh 15y ago

kamaal 15y ago
Not true, I remember a few years back being a major Perl shop. The advice from senior guy in the hierarchy to use Python was 'If Google is using it, it must be good'. And I know whole bunch of people around me in many projects used it just because of Google. Every tool has its own merit Python is nothing special in this regard. Python's low barrier to entry has invited many newbie's to pick it up in a day or two and get going with solving problems. But it has its own flaws and isn't that great as often people project it to be. My own experience with Python, after being a heavy Perl and Ruby user isn't that good. Especially if you are coming from a language like Perl, Python as a language has an interesting trend. At first you feel very happy that things are so simple with it. Then slowly once you learn the language and start getting deeper into it, you try to use it for day to day work. Suddenly you realize that text processing sucks badly, something that is very big problem on Unix based environments. Writing a single regex takes a 10's of lines of exception handling. You try to use it for quick dirty scripting, again the language runs out of steam very soon. Its just too verbose for scripting class. Now coming to more important reasons. Sacrificing power for readability might be great for newbie's but isn't good experienced programmers. Lack of multiline lambda's, no good support for TOC, GIL, barely there object system(compared to Moose), lack of extensibility, lack of syntax plugins. Forcing one way of doing things, all this is great hindrance if one wants to climb upper steps in the ladder of programming. And above all lack of thing like CPAN is just something more than sufficient reason above everything else. I left Python for Perl, but had to go back again. Python wasn't just serving the need for day to day quick scripting. Which I often need to do twice or thrice a day. Text is uneliminable part of large IT projects. Tools like Perl, sed , awk help me do my job quickly everyday. Slowly I realized if I'm using Perl every 50 minutes, I might as well use it for long term projects. On the other hand, Best practices matter for every project. You can writeable and un maintainable code both in any language. We are back to being a Perl shop again. And its the best decision we have made.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- jergosh 15y ago
  Incidentally, I'm working on a language comparison which includes Perl and Python and I would be interested to see how Perl string handling is superior. Did you mean speed or syntax or both? I always thought that the Perl way is quite friendly if you have Unix background, but since Python does everything by function calls it's also fine. As for exception handling, I guess it'll always be shorter in Perl since it doesn't really support exceptions...
  - kamaal 15y ago
    Perl has exception handling, its only that its not available via your usual try-catch syntax. If you want a more sugary exception handling syntax there is always Try::Tiny ( http://search.cpan.org/~doy/Try-Tiny-0.09/lib/Try/Tiny.pm http://search.cpan.org/~doy/Try-Tiny-0.09/lib/Try/Tiny.pm). Another advantage Perl has over Python in case of parsing is that regular expressions are first class elements in Perl, so they can be passed around like objects. Combine them with more powerful things like given-when(http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html#Switch-statements http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html#Switch-statements) and parsing becomes a lot more easier when compared to Python. Smart matching is a great feature. And all this obviously leads to better performance in terms of speed because less code to process means (to an extent faster code). And syntactically as well. Imagine doing such a thing in Python. There isn't smart match operator at the first place, there is no switch statement, and on top of that dealing with innumerable regular expression functions(compile,match,search) with try-catch statements inside if-else loops. This piece of code in Python won't be easy to read and solution isn't elegant and better than Perl either. Perl turns out to be better in all ways, the code is readable, concise, faster and powerful.
    - jergosh 15y ago
      Yeah, it's through eval() which is a questionable design decision at best. Regular expressions can be passed as objects in Python, too. Three functions is hardly 'innumerable'. "Perl turns out to be better in all ways, the code is readable, concise, faster and powerful." To each his own, I guess.

Python is too good a language not to have made it. Google endorsement helped a lot, but they chose it because it's great.

by jergosh 15y ago

Python is too good a language not to have made it. Google endorsement helped a lot, but they chose it because it's great.

kamaal 15y ago

Not true, I remember a few years back being a major Perl shop. The advice from senior guy in the hierarchy to use Python was 'If Google is using it, it must be good'. And I know whole bunch of people around me in many projects used it just because of Google. Every tool has its own merit Python is nothing special in this regard. Python's low barrier to entry has invited many newbie's to pick it up in a day or two and get going with solving problems. But it has its own flaws and isn't that great as often people project it to be. My own experience with Python, after being a heavy Perl and Ruby user isn't that good. Especially if you are coming from a language like Perl, Python as a language has an interesting trend. At first you feel very happy that things are so simple with it. Then slowly once you learn the language and start getting deeper into it, you try to use it for day to day work. Suddenly you realize that text processing sucks badly, something that is very big problem on Unix based environments. Writing a single regex takes a 10's of lines of exception handling. You try to use it for quick dirty scripting, again the language runs out of steam very soon. Its just too verbose for scripting class. Now coming to more important reasons. Sacrificing power for readability might be great for newbie's but isn't good experienced programmers. Lack of multiline lambda's, no good support for TOC, GIL, barely there object system(compared to Moose), lack of extensibility, lack of syntax plugins. Forcing one way of doing things, all this is great hindrance if one wants to climb upper steps in the ladder of programming. And above all lack of thing like CPAN is just something more than sufficient reason above everything else. I left Python for Perl, but had to go back again. Python wasn't just serving the need for day to day quick scripting. Which I often need to do twice or thrice a day. Text is uneliminable part of large IT projects. Tools like Perl, sed , awk help me do my job quickly everyday. Slowly I realized if I'm using Perl every 50 minutes, I might as well use it for long term projects. On the other hand, Best practices matter for every project. You can writeable and un maintainable code both in any language. We are back to being a Perl shop again. And its the best decision we have made.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
jergosh 15y ago
Incidentally, I'm working on a language comparison which includes Perl and Python and I would be interested to see how Perl string handling is superior. Did you mean speed or syntax or both? I always thought that the Perl way is quite friendly if you have Unix background, but since Python does everything by function calls it's also fine. As for exception handling, I guess it'll always be shorter in Perl since it doesn't really support exceptions...
- kamaal 15y ago
  Perl has exception handling, its only that its not available via your usual try-catch syntax. If you want a more sugary exception handling syntax there is always Try::Tiny ( http://search.cpan.org/~doy/Try-Tiny-0.09/lib/Try/Tiny.pm http://search.cpan.org/~doy/Try-Tiny-0.09/lib/Try/Tiny.pm). Another advantage Perl has over Python in case of parsing is that regular expressions are first class elements in Perl, so they can be passed around like objects. Combine them with more powerful things like given-when(http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html#Switch-statements http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html#Switch-statements) and parsing becomes a lot more easier when compared to Python. Smart matching is a great feature. And all this obviously leads to better performance in terms of speed because less code to process means (to an extent faster code). And syntactically as well. Imagine doing such a thing in Python. There isn't smart match operator at the first place, there is no switch statement, and on top of that dealing with innumerable regular expression functions(compile,match,search) with try-catch statements inside if-else loops. This piece of code in Python won't be easy to read and solution isn't elegant and better than Perl either. Perl turns out to be better in all ways, the code is readable, concise, faster and powerful.
  - jergosh 15y ago
    Yeah, it's through eval() which is a questionable design decision at best. Regular expressions can be passed as objects in Python, too. Three functions is hardly 'innumerable'. "Perl turns out to be better in all ways, the code is readable, concise, faster and powerful." To each his own, I guess.