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Comment by reidrac | Hacker News Reader

I've been a Perl fan for years and I really enjoyed using the language in my personal projects (and in a couple of professional projects, it was "the secret ingredient"), but I couldn't fight all the prejudices surrounding Perl; so I finally gave up and learnt Python hoping to find a quality job as software developer.

It worked out pretty well and I found a great job. I love doing Python, the community and the culture behind the language, so I've never looked back.

I get contacted from time to time by recruiters looking for Perl developers but the truth is that it is still less frequent than Python; and now I don't have to explain that you can use a powerful language in different ways and that it's up to you if your code is readable, maintainable and easy to deploy.

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But he used perl to build some thing huge. Just wondering if that huge thing would have run as smooth in python as in perl?

I used to love Perl as well, it is amazing for text processing and at the time was the silver tape of Internet.

It is pleasant to write, but I can't say the same for reading: sometimes it is hard to understand my own Perl code after untouched for a few months. In this regard, my experience is the same: Python is more readable and easy to maintain.

There's more than one way to do it (TMTOWTDI or TIMTOWTDI, pronounced “Tim Toady”) is a Perl programming motto. This is diametrically opposed to the zen of Python: "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it"

Once you get used to Python, it is very hard to get back to “Tim Toady”, and your Python experience is likely to heavily influence how you write in other languages.

What a absurd python propaganda it is.

Read http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Perl_vs_Python

I did a year of Python. There are good and bad things with everything. Python was OK, the learning curve the first few weeks/months is really well planned.

I prefer Perl given a competent team. Mostly because of the CPAN Testers and because it is fun.

Bad with Python are details like e.g. no real one-liners. I also think there is something rotten with the language culture that e.g. results in lots and lots of language war trolls from 19-karma accounts on HN...

Is there any reason to expect that it wouldn't run as well in Python? They're both dynamic, interpreted languages, and it's not as though no-one's ever written a large codebase in Python.

HAHA Python is fucking readable. https://github.com/hiddenillusion/AnalyzePE/blob/master/Adob... http://blog.delroth.net/2013/03/escaping-a-python-sandbox-nd...

Any language can be made unreadable. I can write terrible Ruby/Perl/PHP/JavaScript, too. Doesn't make them bad languages.

Yes, Python is more unreadable than Perl to me. :)

Read https://coosoft.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/the-perl-vs-python-...

Agreed, I"m a Ruby person personally and often end up writing things that later I only shake my head at and rip out and replace with a few lines or a better idiom/algorithm.

To be honest the parent comment to yours first link reminds me of a rather lot of shell/perl created by people that treat things with the procedural mindset and just keep bashing their heads against a problem until it succeeds. There isn't anything wrong with that but that python really is no different stylistically than any of the "horrible perl" stories I've seen. I've seen perl that made most ruby look unreadable at first glance too. I think it really goes to show encrypting human thought into programming languages is not trivial. Also I'm getting sick of these $foo_language is better/worse/a threat(really threat? weird word choice imo) to anything. Every language I learn I learn something new in. Even if its the ones I don't like much like Java/PHP, doesn't mean they're bad languages or they're devoid of being able to teach you new ways to approach problems.

Meh, ranted longer about this than I'd thought I would.

To my mind, that's a success for Perl: it allows people who wouldn't otherwise be able to write programs to do so. Sure, they make messes--who doesn't at first?--but they get things done.

True enough, just pointing out that you can write... ugly code in any language. Bash/perl tend to get abused more often from what I've seen. Hopefully they improve in the future.

That first link is terrible. They should have used a rules engine.

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