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Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

I've written an answer to this on this question on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Why-should-I-use-Python-over-Perl

The short version is:

Different people think differently and different languages require different thought models and as such appeal to different people. Different languages prioritize different computation models and as such are differently suited for different purposes. And lastly, different languages provide different sets of third-party libraries.

Python's main advantages over other dynamic languages are as such:

- it traded expressivity for simplicity of syntax and as such is easy to master

- out of all the dynamic languages (other than R) it is best suited for numerical calculation

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And people prefer different coding styles. One persons "icky syntax and forced use of whitespace" is another ones preference. At the same time, you trade your freedom of whitespace expression with simplicity when you need to understand or work with code written by others.

> you trade your freedom of whitespace expression with simplicity when you need to understand or work with code written by others.

To be fair, that's a red herring in an age where most languages have tools available to clean up and reformat a weirdly formatted file directly in your editor. (I have Perl::Tidy bound to Ctrl+E and that combination gets hit more often than the space key, especially on code i am writing.)

You are not just looking at code in your editor and the majority of tools are not able to just reformat code.

Reformatting also breaks line numbers which makes it difficult to talk about the code with others.

> You are not just looking at code in your editor and the majority of tools are not able to just reformat code.

Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V are a thing. The last time i looked at code on paper was years ago. In practice over the past 9 years i have not looked at any piece of code that i wasn't able to tidy so i could work with it.

> Reformatting also breaks line numbers which makes it difficult to talk about the code with others.

Ctrl+Z is also a thing, as is a vast number of pastebins. Again, in practice i have never run into the problem you describe, and i work with what is claimed by some to be the most unreadable mainstream language in existence.

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