why isn't python more popular?

[sp00fd]

"bowman" <bowman at montana.com> wrote:
>
>sp00fd <sp00fdNOspSPAM at yahoo.com.invalid> wrote in message
>news:0966e402.6de6df86 at usw-ex0104-031.remarq.com...
>>
>> Is it that white space counts?  That's really the only gripe
>> that I see.
>
>perl is a comfortable choice for *nix systems programmers, and
has
>been around longer, so it is back to the 'installed base'
argument. In
>my shop, we can use any language for internal development and
>maintenance tasks, but scripts intended for client sites are
written in
>perl, because perl is already installed, and Python isn't.
>
>For those people who aren't fluid in shell scripts, awk, sed,
C, and
>so forth Python is the logical choice. However, this
description tends
>to fit VB and VC programmers, many of whom haven't discovered
Python
>yet. Give it time.
>
>The whitespace problem can be overcome with a decent editor,
but it
>certainly is not a real selling point.
>
>CPAN is the real killer, though. Again, given time Python will
catch up,
>but the people look at the resources of CPAN and use perl. Once
>you have learned perl, unless you like playing with languages,
many
>people will not bother learning a similar language where there
isn't
>a clear cut advantage.
>

I'd definitely agree with the CPAN deal.  I've had a hard time
in the past trying to find a module that I felt should probably
exist, but didn't seem to or wasn't easily found.  Quite
honestly, a great deal of the modules I've used seem...less
complete than their perl equivalents as well.

Your mention of perl being installed already on certain machines
caught my eye as well.  This is a large reason why I often stick
to KornShell, but now with Solaris and AIX shipping with perl, I
fear that it may become more of a standard that it is today.  I
have to admit that I use perl, often when I'm doing a lot of
text parsing, but in the back of my mind I know that python is a
much better language.  For me though, the argument that it's
more readable/maintainable doesn't work because there are more
people that I work with that have and idea about perl than
python.  Unfortunately with perl being shipped with more
systems, I can only imagine that more of my work will be done in
perl that python.  Is there an advocate of some sort (someone
similar to Eric Raymond) that is pushing OS vendors to include
python?  I think we need a marketing dept. ;).


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