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by reacweb 2952 days ago
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.
1 comments
busterarm 2952 days ago
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.

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Sileni 2952 days ago
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.

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busterarm 2952 days ago
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.

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