Re: I want you to convince me to learn Perl

[sundialsvc4]

That’s easy:   look at both!

Python, despite its very peculiar use of indentation as a lexical property of the source-code (“white space is meaningful!”), is a very powerful list-processing language with many inspirations and similarities to LISP ... without those Little Irritating Silly Parentheses.   Perl, on the other hand, has a marvelous way with text files.   Both are workhorses, and general-purpose.   Both can be used to do the others’s work, but both have their own unique comparative strengths, and since both are equally at-hand . . .

In reality, you’ll find yourself using several different scripting languages, and production systems quite-commonly contain an oddly-fitting hodgepodge of them.   Therefore, I would suggest that you split your attention between these two.   Maybe you’ll trend toward a favorite, or maybe not.   I never drew favorites ...   This breadth of knowledge will surely help you when you peel-the-onion of a new system and look at how they built it and say . . . :-O !!

[LanX]

> is a very powerful list-processing language with many inspirations and similarities to LISP

Sigh ... Perl has much more in common with LISP then Python, i.e. translating LISP code to Perl is much easier.

Please show counter examples¹ or stop repeating this nonsense!

¹) except docstrings.

[sundialsvc4]

Obviously, I did not intend my words to be taken quite so literally as to suggest that one would “translate from” one to the other.   Rather, the Python language has many list processing builtins and idioms ... a general flavor for doing things, if you will ... that draws many inspirations from the LISP approach to doing these same things.

We hardly need to “translate code from X to Y,” anyway, since we always have ready access at-hand to both worlds.   Our professional tool-boxes contain many tools in parallel.