6 ms·

I'm genuinely curious - why are programmers still using Perl instead of Python?

ugexe 13y ago
Why would I use python if I'm well versed in perl?
perigrin 13y ago
Some people actually find Perl fits the way they think better than Python does. They may find the culture a better fit, or they're better able to find existing solutions, or they simply prefer the concept of "There's more than one way to do it" over "There should be one – and preferably only one – obvious way to do it." Finally some are better paid to write Perl than they are to write Python. The reality is any/some/all of the reasons above apply to any combination languages in your question. Might as well ask "Why are programmers still using COBOL rather than Erlang?" Because.
Ricapar 13y ago
I work in a group that manages a large amount of Solaris, AIX, and Linux servers, of varying versions. When I'm writing scripts that can be run on any given system, there are very few things I can use that I know will work. One of those is Perl (5.8.8) and the other is Korn Shell (ksh).
a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
Why not? I can't think of a serious reason to favor one over the other between any of Ruby, Perl, and Python. A lot of people find Python's scope rules annoying. I've heard Perl has the best unicode support.
bonemachine 13y ago
Feeling of being "in the moment" & having maximal individual control (Perl 5) versus long-haul maintainability + potential to be widely collaborative, if perhaps at a slight loss in expressiveness (Python). Perl 6 being an entirely different beast from either of these two languages, of course.
chromatic 13y ago
CPAN, Unicode, testing, and long term maintainability of the code (Seriously; I can tell the difference between good Perl and bad Perl at a skim. Good Python and bad Python tend to look the same. Truly awful Python is immediately obvious, but that's not an interesting case to consider.)
goldenkey 13y ago
Really? Python has magic everywhere and requires methods to take self as an argument. Indentation instead of brackets. It's one big hack. Perl is a much nicer language. The real question is, why would I ever use Python over Perl?
- meowface 13y ago
  What in Python is "magical"? The fact that methods take a "self" argument is a result of it not being magical.
  - goldenkey 13y ago
    Methods taking "self" as an argument is a dirty hack, ain't no magic there. The language is just pretty ugly. It's got the whole whitespace thing going on, which is forced, and some might think it gives a good aesthetic but that is dust in the wind in terms of help for Python's ease on the eyes. The whole standard namespacing and mix of oop/procedural global functions is just..schizophrenic, the capitalization scheme is dastardly. I haven't seen many languages that look more _basic_ than python. It's a frankenstein of Perl/Ruby and Basic. Forced verbosity is egh. Here's your magic methods and properties: http://www.rafekettler.com/magicmethods.html http://www.rafekettler.com/magicmethods.html Those magic methods kind of remind me of clever hacks while coding in PHP.
    - Alphasite_ 13y ago
      Magic methods have always been my favourite part of python, they're the developers way of ensuring we can do anything that they can do, if there isn't a magic method for it, it's not possible. We can create our own version of anything in the standard library. Self is one of those things, if you wanted to you could easily add another instance variable, just implement getattr and have it return a partial function. Although I will admit it is one area which does cause more than its fair share of errors, but I prefer it to Ruby's methodology.
      - goldenkey 13y ago

ugexe 13y ago

Why would I use python if I'm well versed in perl?

Some people actually find Perl fits the way they think better than Python does. They may find the culture a better fit, or they're better able to find existing solutions, or they simply prefer the concept of "There's more than one way to do it" over "There should be one – and preferably only one – obvious way to do it." Finally some are better paid to write Perl than they are to write Python. The reality is any/some/all of the reasons above apply to any combination languages in your question. Might as well ask "Why are programmers still using COBOL rather than Erlang?" Because.

Ricapar 13y ago

I work in a group that manages a large amount of Solaris, AIX, and Linux servers, of varying versions. When I'm writing scripts that can be run on any given system, there are very few things I can use that I know will work. One of those is Perl (5.8.8) and the other is Korn Shell (ksh).

a8da6b0c91d 13y ago

Why not? I can't think of a serious reason to favor one over the other between any of Ruby, Perl, and Python. A lot of people find Python's scope rules annoying. I've heard Perl has the best unicode support.

bonemachine 13y ago

Feeling of being "in the moment" & having maximal individual control (Perl 5) versus long-haul maintainability + potential to be widely collaborative, if perhaps at a slight loss in expressiveness (Python). Perl 6 being an entirely different beast from either of these two languages, of course.

chromatic 13y ago

CPAN, Unicode, testing, and long term maintainability of the code (Seriously; I can tell the difference between good Perl and bad Perl at a skim. Good Python and bad Python tend to look the same. Truly awful Python is immediately obvious, but that's not an interesting case to consider.)

goldenkey 13y ago

Really? Python has magic everywhere and requires methods to take self as an argument. Indentation instead of brackets. It's one big hack. Perl is a much nicer language. The real question is, why would I ever use Python over Perl?

meowface 13y ago
What in Python is "magical"? The fact that methods take a "self" argument is a result of it not being magical.
- goldenkey 13y ago
  Methods taking "self" as an argument is a dirty hack, ain't no magic there. The language is just pretty ugly. It's got the whole whitespace thing going on, which is forced, and some might think it gives a good aesthetic but that is dust in the wind in terms of help for Python's ease on the eyes. The whole standard namespacing and mix of oop/procedural global functions is just..schizophrenic, the capitalization scheme is dastardly. I haven't seen many languages that look more _basic_ than python. It's a frankenstein of Perl/Ruby and Basic. Forced verbosity is egh. Here's your magic methods and properties: http://www.rafekettler.com/magicmethods.html http://www.rafekettler.com/magicmethods.html Those magic methods kind of remind me of clever hacks while coding in PHP.
  - Alphasite_ 13y ago
    Magic methods have always been my favourite part of python, they're the developers way of ensuring we can do anything that they can do, if there isn't a magic method for it, it's not possible. We can create our own version of anything in the standard library. Self is one of those things, if you wanted to you could easily add another instance variable, just implement getattr and have it return a partial function. Although I will admit it is one area which does cause more than its fair share of errors, but I prefer it to Ruby's methodology.
    - goldenkey 13y ago