Re: [SLE] [OT] Multiplatform script interpreter/language

"Python is what Perl should have been."

The Perl6 team are currently redesigning the base language and they aren't making it look like Python.

A rough metric: How many people have switched from Perl to Python. A: Many. How many people have voluntarily switched from Python to Perl? A: One was reported, but upon investigation, he could not be found. ;)

We look forward to seeing the evidence to support these two statements. :o)

Python has lots of modules and a large code base also. Not as large as Perl's but enough to help a great deal.

Python doesn't have anywhere near the depth of module support that Perl has. It's easy to talk up what Python has in this regard, but only if, as in the quote above, one conveniently ignores what Perl has.

Python versus Perl The above is part of the language comparisons in _The Quick Python Book_.

...and is therefore completely and totally biased. Python has much better structure than Perl, and therefore makes a better language for writing large programs and applications. Perl is much tighter, and has a much more efficient syntax. That makes it harder to master, but also makes it a much more efficient tool for a programmer who needs to solve a specific limited problem quickly. I've used Perl for years and Python quite a lot more recently. So far, IMHO, the only thing which Python is obviously better at is building GUI based applications. Python/Qt is a superb combination of power and simple convenience. Python was also much easier to learn. The answer to the original poster's question, though, is still Tcl. For simplicity and power for solving general problems, as well as GUI work, it leaves both Perl and Python standing. -- "...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE ...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003