Why use Python instead of Perl?

[eichin at metacarta.com]

> >*including* reading the tutorial :-) It involved pulling certain stuff out of
> >the cache directory of a HTTP proxy server.
> 
> Ha ha!  Same first project here.  The current version of that first
> project is split as one XML-RPC server --running in every squid box in

Does *everyone* do one of these?  Maybe it's time to come up with a
real one and get it into the distribution :-)

In my case, it was actually written in perl -- because the squid
servers in question are on AIX boxes that I can't get at, but do have
perl on them (that's the one place I still find perl strictly more
useful: both AIX and Solaris ship with it...)  But all mine does is do
a find based on a timestamp over the spool dir, and spit out the files
in a tar-like format.  The code on the far end is "smarter" (and has
already been rewritten in python :-)

Interesting that you mention XML-RPC, too.  I'd been introduced to
modern python by qmtest, but it was actually memory leakage in perl's
SOAP::Lite that "drove me over the wall" -- I reduced the leaky perl
code to a sample, then wrote the same code in python... grabbed the
CVS version of SOAP.py, and showed the python code talking to the
*same server* and not leaking.  I then leveraged this into convincing
everyone that perl code should *all* get rewritten in python, and it
has worked out well :-)

			_Mark_ <eichin at metacarta.com>