Mailing List Archive

Python and Perl (was: converting perl to python)
[.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@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@es.co.nz>
Python and Perl (was: converting perl to python) [ In reply to ]
Ben Caradoc-Davies wrote:
> Perl is a fertile breeding ground for Pythonistas. I'm sure
> many expand into Python from Perl.

Count me as one such user. I started using Perl for sysadmin
tasks back in the early 90's. From there I expanded to
database management, text-mode UI's, code generation, etc.

My experience with Perl gave me the courage to "bet the farm"
on business projects with Python, starting in 1994.

One other debt I must acknowledge. Prior even to Perl, I
had many pleasant experiences using Awk. Does anyone remember
Jon Bentley's "Confessions of a Coder" books? Marvelous stuff.

all-this-and-C++-too-ly yr's

Jeff Bauer
Rubicon, Inc.
Python and Perl (was: converting perl to python) [ In reply to ]
On Thu, 29 Apr 1999 23:54:33 GMT, Jeff Bauer <jbauer@rubic.com> wrote:
> One other debt I must acknowledge. Prior even to Perl, I
> had many pleasant experiences using Awk.

Yes! I came to perl via csh, awk and bash myself. As a scientific programmer
with a C / Fortran / Matlab background, with the sacrifice-everything-for-that-
last-1%-speedup mentality, scripting was quite an eye-opener.

[.Doh! Previously mailed to Jeff - let's keep followups in the newsgroup.
Thanks.]

--
Ben Caradoc-Davies <bmcd@es.co.nz>
Python and Perl (was: converting perl to python) [ In reply to ]
Jeff Bauer wrote:

> One other debt I must acknowledge. Prior even to Perl, I
> had many pleasant experiences using Awk.

indeed, before i learned perl, most every tool i wrote was a
grep | sed | awk
pipeline. perl was great, allowing all of this to be expressed
in one language. perl, and tcl/tk before it, caused the big
"Aha!" experience about scripting languages. then came python,
and i haven't used 'em since.



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garry@sage.att.com eight times up
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