Python vs. Perl, which is better to learn?

[Alex Martelli]

Patrick W wrote:
        ...
>> I may be missing something, but C# strikes me as VERY close indeed
>> to Java -- I can't really understand (on a purely technical plane)
>> liking one and despising the other.
        ...
> deeper than mine). But do the languages 'feel' at all similar to you?

Yes.  Delegates are a clunky approximation of bound-methods, and Java's
inner classes are only marginally more clunky (which IMHO they compensate
for by offering somewhat richer functionality).  Properties are nice
(I really dislike the boilerplate implied by getThis/setThat) but they
do feel rather marginal in a language's overall makeup.  And Events are
positively redundant IMHO.

However, while I've written some decent amounts of Java (albeit quite
a while ago), a few 10s of thousands of lines, I can't claim the same
for C#, so this is more an evaluation coming from _looking_ at the
language rather than actually using it in production.

>> I don't see how C# per se should have substantially better
>> performance possibilites than Java, in particular -- it will mostly
        ...
> Sure. There's nothing inherent in the _languages_ that make one
> necessarily "faster" than the other. But in practice, I have not seen
> a compelling proof of concept in Java, even after all these years. I
> should add that I'm more interested in the client side than the server
> side, and I'm prejudiced by the fact that no matter how well I write
> my code, my Swing applications will be weighed down by huge piles of

While many Java libraries are good, Swing is undoubtedly heavy.  It
does not seem to me that .NET's GUI lib is a match for PyQt either,
though.

> Beyond the languages (and into the "platforms"), I also think the .NET
> component model is more interesting than the JVM, but enough said for

I don't mind .NET at all.  I may agree it has some strengths compared
to the corresponding aspects of the J2EE platform.  I don't think those 
strengths, per se, distinguish C# and Java all that deeply.  Trying to
inextricably link Java/language and Java/platform was Sun's technical
mistake (which fortunately great hacks such as Jython can to some
extent bypass), explicitly making .NET multilanguage a good move by
Microsoft (even though Python.NET's problems suggest that support for
highly dynamic languages isn't as good as it might have been:-).


Alex