Python was designed (was Re: Multi-threading in Python vs Java)

[Roy Smith]

In article <525a15ad$0$29984$c3e8da3$5496439d at news.astraweb.com>,
 Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:

> While I agree with your general thrust, I don't think it's quite so 
> simple. Perl has a king, Larry Wall, but his design is more or less 
> "throw everything into the pot, it'll be fine" and consequently Perl is, 
> well, *weird*, with some pretty poor^W strange design decisions.

To be fair to Larry, there were different design drivers working there.

Pre-perl, people built humungous shell scripts, duct-taping together 
little bits of sed, grep, awk, and other command-line tools.  What perl 
did, was make it easier to use the functionality of those disparate 
tools together in a single language.  By holding on to the little bits 
of syntax from the precursor languages, he kept the result familiar 
feeling, so Unix sysadmins (who were the main audience for perl) were 
willing to adopt it.

It was wildly successful, not because it was perfect, but because it 
beat the pants off what came before it.