[Discuss] Interpreters vs Compilers

[Deryk Barker]

Adam Parkin wrote:
> Deryk Barker wrote:
>> Why perl rather than python? You gain nothing and you lose a lot - 
>> readability for one.  
>
> I disagree with that.  I have a pile of excellent Perl reference books 
> on my bookshelf and when I go to write a short throwaway script it 
> never takes me more than 5 minutes to find what I'm looking for (I did 
> this just a couple of days ago in fact).  And if I can't find it in 
> there, then the man pages are absolutely excellent.  And if I can't 
> find it there, CPAN fills in nicely.
>
> With Python, I managed to find a barely decent set of online 
> documentation (the "official" docs by Guido), and not a single decent 
> book on the language that was anywhere near as clear or helpful as 
> "Learning Perl" is for Perl.
I think it's a while since you looked, there are a number of books on 
python now and several of them are very good.
> Not to mention there's nothing even close to resembling CPAN (last 
> time I checked) for Python.
>
> Admittedly part of this is just personal familiarity, but to say you 
> "gain nothing" with Perl is just off the wall wrong.  I'm not saying 
> that Python sucks and Perl rules, in fact I'd agree completely that 
> Python is a much better language for "real world" (i.e. - 
> nonthrowaway) projects.  It's most definitely a better teaching 
> language for new programmers to learn.  All I'm saying is that there 
> are perks to the Perl side of the equation.
I'll grant you superiority in handling regular expressions, but I would 
suggest that for anything over 50-100 lines perl becomes unwieldy - and 
rapidly unreadable. I'm not terribly familiar with CPAN (I do know what 
it is) and am not sure if there's a python equivalent. There do seem to 
be libraries to do pretty much anything you'd want to do though.
>
> > I object in principal to a language that makes me memorise the top
> > row of the keyboard, shifted...
>
> $ and % are only 2 of the 12 keys in the top of my keyboard. :p
You mean there aren't variables called, e.g. $# and $_ ? and that the @ 
at the beginning of a name has no significance?