[olskool]

Python was never intended to replace Perl. Perl was designed to extract stuff from text files. Python was designed as a scripting language for system programming. IM(Seldom Humble)O Python beat Perl for two reasons (a) batteries included (CPAN became a clusterfuck) (b) C API lead to stuff like SciPy, NumPy and Pandas.

FWIW I've used both Perl and Python professionally and Python rules.

[reacweb]

Perl is a little older than Python. Most of the ideology of Python was a reaction against Perl (https://wiki.python.org/moin/TOOWTDI). Python has always tried to be as good as Perl on everything. I use very much Perl for what it was intended: parsing files (often log files and configuration files), producing reports and launching commands (shell replacement). I have tried to use Python for the same tasks, in particular when some of the files were in xml (xml parsing in Python is nicer than in Perl). Regular expression usage is easier in Perl where multithreading is easier in Python. IMHO, the main handicap of Python vs Perl is the lack of autovivification. Python is very good for teaching (whiteboard interview) or as a scripting language around some big libraries (like tensorflow). At my work, the small glue scripts are almost always in shell or in Perl. The Python applications are being rewritten in Java because of maintenance issues (mainly caused by lack of proper typing). Python does not rule here.

[busterarm]

You might want to try Ruby for some of those things you reached to Python for. It takes direct inspiration from Perl and does a lot of those things better, IMO.

Nokogiri is hands-down the best tool for dealing with XML that there is.

I have much the same experience with Python and anything significant developed in Python here ends up getting rewritten in Go.

[Sileni]

Not to move the post, but that's part of what makes python so great to me. It reads like pseudocode if written with that goal in mind. Its more like having a conversation with the computer. When I need performance, I now have the algorithm written out in an easy to parse way. Then small parts in golang/C are far faster to write, because I can feel out the whole program.

Im not directly in the software industry though, just writing programs for data analysis in quality and safety programs. I'm sure once you can think directly in something like Go, it'd be faster to write that program first. But it decreases the cognitive load for me.

[busterarm]

No worries -- I actually agree with you. We actually don't do very much scripting at my company in general -- Java, Go and JS (for Lambda) are roughly what we've standardized on.

We have a bunch of Python scripts for operations work and it's rare that performance becomes a major concern (...except in/regarding Ansible). Development isn't my team's primary responsibility so this state of things is fine -- our SysEng team can grok Python pretty well, whereas with other languages I wouldn't say this is true.

[marklgr]

To me, the main reason of Python success vs Perl is that it's much easier to learn, so anyone can jump in even with limited programming experience.

[mannykannot]

That is probably true with regard to its adoption, but, as a Perl fan and user, I have to say that in addition, the limitations of Perl 5's syntax begin to show once you get in to collections of collections, and passing them to functions. If you are doing this sort of thing every day, it becomes second nature, but as a casual, ad-hoc user, it is no longer in my working memory.

Maybe Perl 6 fixes these things, but learning it is too far down on my to-do list, where it sits just below Ruby.

If I have a problem that can be solved by looping through the lines of a text file and applying some combination of regular expression matching and substitution, the split and join functions, simple arrays and hash tables, I reach for Perl 5.

[bionoid]

> Python beat Perl for two reasons [...]

The reason I personally left Perl was the extremely hostile community. When someone asked a simple question, not only would they get an overhaul and namecalling, but so would anyone that tried to help them.

Python seemed to do a much better job at onboarding new people. To me, that seems like the most important reason they won in the long run.

[liveoneggs]

that is a very abnormal experience. Larry Wall has personally helped me with at least two junior issues over the years by just randomly answering in general forums.

FWIW perl6 takes extra special effort to be nice.

[bionoid]

> that is a very abnormal experience.

I don't have links handy, but there were official blog posts and such about how they endeavored to fix the problem. Of course I'm not saying it was universal, nor trying to take away from the fact that there are a lot of great people in the Perl community (PerlMonks is a good example)

They did fix it, as far as I can tell anyway, but it was too little too late.

[collyw]

>CPAN became a clusterfuck

Did it? Not used Perl for a while but I never needed to worry about backward compatibility and versions with CPAN, while I find I do with Python (to be fair I am programming more complex stuff than I did in my Perl days).

[FractalLP]

I've used Python for years and a little Perl. CPAN works pretty well when used with ActiveState...not sure about Unix. Python on Windows stinks when using Pip and there is some VisualStudio C++ library dependency you need and they don't even have anymore. With Python it is best to get a large distribution that bundles everything already such as Anaconda...not worth the hassle.

[ivanhoe]

IMO Python won primarily because its syntax was more English-like, which makes it a lot easier and more readable to regular people who never worked with shell and linux, and perl's $#@%>> and regExps confused the hell of them. That and the boom of PHP killed Perl 5 popularity, while python got its foot in the door in science/finance niches and survived.

[Zash]

> CPAN became a clusterfuck

This gave me flashbacks to installing some perl module and watching it download half of CPAN.

[olskool]

Just as bad I'd download CPAN module A then CPAN module B and CPAN would totally trash A.

[vgy7ujm]

Still NPM is so much worse...

[Zash]

Those who don't learn from history etc.