Why use Python when we've got Perl?

[Tom Christiansen]

     [courtesy cc of this posting mailed to cited author]

In comp.lang.perl.misc, thehaas at my-deja.com writes:
:Although Perl and Python, as languages, are very similar, the culture
:that surrounds the two languages are quite different.  I know when I've
:asked someone for help in either Python or Perl, the Python people are
:definitely the most helpful.  I think I can safely say, that the Perl
:community is quite arrogant, especially to people new to it.  

It certainly didn't start out that way, and for many years Perl was
famous for being precisely exactly the opposite of hostile.  It was
about a programming community of mutual benefit.

Think back to the 80s and early 90s.  The change, if it really happened,
came with the upty-gazillion CGI script kiddies who couldn't program
2+2, yet who wanted *us* to write *them* these persistent, encrypted,
crossplatform, multiscreen shopping carts for e-commerce, complete with
dynamically-generated animated vanity counters, each and every time 
they stepped up to the feeder.

As a result, There's not much left of a spirit of a programming community
of mutual benefit when it becomes numerically dominated by people who
don't want to study or to work or EVEN TO PROGRAM, and who all seem to
think you owe them something.

When > 90% of the newsgroup postings are ill-formatted garbledy-gook
that also fall into the category of not having bothered to have first
checked the online docs or faqs that come with Perl, these things add up.
And eventually, it risks breaking our spirit.  There's just no way to deal
with the never-ending onslaught of non-programmer CGI script kiddies, who
seem to outnumber the rest of us zillions to one.  

So what do you do?  You either bail out of this untenable situation, as
Larry Wall has done, or else "customer-service battle fatigue" sets in.
When that happens, people end up getting snapped at, sometimes mistaking
an honest learner for yet another beggar looking for handouts.  I dare
say this would happen even in the best of families, given equivalent
circumstances.  I do think that earnest individuals seriously wanting
to work hard are still given the same helping hand they always got.

Be careful what you wish for.

--tom
-- 
Emacs is a fine operating system, but I still prefer Unix. -me