convince me

[holger krekel]

Kyle Babich wrote:
> I started learning perl but more recently I found python.  Both look
> to have their advantages, so I'm having a hard time picking one to
> stick with and persue.  I have seen arguments that python has cleaner
> syntax, is gaining in popularity, with excellent documentation, and is
> better for group projects, which is all fairly obvious.  But (from a
> _neutral_ standpoint I am asking) what can python do that perl can't?

perl and python (and tcl and ruby for that matter) are all very
powerful languages. They *all* have a large and excellent repository 
of libaries/code you can reuse (Web, Images, Numerics, Networks ...). 

Python does for me ...

- provide most readable code

- avoids bloat of syntax-gimmicks (line-noise) compared especially to perl 

- leads you to express ideas at higher levels.
  (I program since 15 years an no other language allowed me
  to do reusable (OO-) patterns as easily.)

- provides a clean C-API (in case you need to do big-scale
  optimization).  A long-time perl-hacker just recently 
  told me that the perl C-code is ?!"@?;§)(!

- has a challenging, knowledgable and nice news-group (c.l.py :-)

For any further comments i'd first like to hear a little bit
of your background (which languages do you know already if any)
and goals (what stuff would you like to do).

    holger