Python vs perl code#

Wimbledon won the FA Cup, and Stefan Edberg (now aged 42) and Steffi Graf (now aged 39) won the singles in the tennis at Wimbledon. To remind you how long ago that is, it's the year of Perestroika (economic restructuring) in the USSR, and that same nation started their withdrawl from Afghanistan that year.

Python vs perl code#

but then if you're not entirely sure what you're doing Perl has some lovely traps that can extend you debugging cycle if you don't know the language very well, to the extent that development ends up being slower than Python.īoth languages include documentation systems - there's Perl's POD and Python's docstrings - and I'm delighted that both languages have something like this available, for it's important that your programs contain the executable code and programmer's comments anduser instructions.īoth languages originated in 1988. Which if you do is fantastic - code can be written very fast indeed and got working very quickly - 'far faster than in any other languagei' I could say. Perl assumes you know what you are doing. Python, on the other had, has intentionally got a very limited number of ways of doing things - 'that's a good alternative' was NOT used as an excuse to add something to the language. Now while that's great in theory (and it's great in an environment where there are people spending most of their time writing and maintaining Perl, and they know the subtle differenceces), it's something of a nightmare in a scenario where code has been written by someone who's perhaps on holiday or has moved on, and/or where a particular way of doing something has been chosen because it's what the particulare code happened to know. Perl has been provides with many ways of doing the same thing.

Python connectivity's pretty good too but it's not got quite the same wide range as Perl. Perl is the ultimate 'glueware' with the ability to link to virtually anything - it's been hevily used for a long time and is designed to be able to talk to technologies old and new.

And not for the first time, my answer had to be 'tell me more about your application, and about the people who will be writing and maintaining it'.Ī comparative diagram on the board provides some help - but of course what's important to one organisation isn't important to another, so conclusions will differ. An interesting question posed to me today - and not for the first time.