Python questions from C/Perl/Java programmer

[Clarence Gardner]

[Tom Biggs]
>> I doubt I'll abandon Perl altogether - I try to pick the right
>> tool for the right job - but Python looks very clean.
>
[Tim Peters ]
>I was a Perl programmer before I picked up Python, but that was in '91(!).
>You're clearly not insane either <wink>, so you may well follow the same
>path I did (& many others have reported since):  you continue using Perl for
>most things.  When Perl is driving you nuts, you do a little more in Python.
>As a side effect, you slowly build a library of Python modules that does
>much of what you do every day, and it's so darned easy to write Python
>modules and classes, and so darned easy to read them six months later, you
>slowly start reaching for Python more and more.  Over time, the size of a
>program you're *willing* to tackle in Perl first shrinks.  Then comes the
>day you're staring at one page of Perl, need to add 3 more features,  the
>first 3 attempts die in hard-to-track-down ways, and you think "oh, screw
>it!  I'll rewrite the whole thing in Python instead".  This is a happy day
><wink>.
>
>After a year or two, you may well find your Perl use reduced to 5-liners!
>And even then, over & over you find yourself saying "hmm!  If I had written
>that in Python instead, I wouldn't have had to track down this bug".

Tom, just in case you might feel obliged to pick up Python gradually, let
me tell you the way I did it.  I was writing mostly Perl with some C when,
about three years ago, I picked up "Programming Python", read it that night,
and haven't written a Perl program since.  That day, I started implementing
a billing system for my company, completely in Python.  When I occasionally
need to go back and do something to it, it's a breeze and I prostrate myself
before my icon of Guido and give thanks that I didn't write it in Perl.

I also believe in using the right tool for the job, but somehow none of my
jobs call for using Perl....