[fud101]

Perl had the batteries and it had CPAN. Python borrowed the best bits of Perl and enjoyed a reputation which overlooked its many flaws. If it had been scrutinized as much as Perl, we'd have realized it was just as bad but in different ways.

[theamk]

This makes no sense.. Python _was_ heavily scrutinized when it was introduced - the whole "Perl vs Python" comparison was pretty popular for a while, with either of those being declared winner, depending on the author.

If there is really a killer argument for Perl over Python that was overlooked in all those years, why don't you say that argument, or even better, write a blog post explaining why Perl is better than Python? Then we could discuss that instead of nebulous "different ways"/

[fud101]

Perl had charm, it was respected by hackers for the joy it brought people who 'got' it. It still remains a beautiful language that I regret not learning due to having a superior taste. Python had none of it. I still don't understand how it won, stealing the halo of a language while having nothing of the sort. The only argument you can make is boring is better imho.

[clay_shirky]

Perl hacker who tried to switch to Ruby before adopting Python here:

Of _course_ boring is better. How could it not be? If you are trying to solve a problem, the last thing you want to be thinking about is the language itself.

The language you adopt to code up a solution should force you to think clearly, but no more than that. Executable pseudocode is as close to an ideal state as you can get for a high-level language.

Perl, meanwhile, was filled with multiple ways to do things -- famously and absurdly thought of as a virtue -- reveled in side effects, and did so much implicit work with variables and flow that perl was often unreadable by anybody else, including the you of three months from now.

"Python did everything other scripting languages did, but in a cleaner and more comprehensible way" tells you most of what you need to know about Python's victory, but the death blow was delivered by the perl community's love of complexity, which led to the disaster that was Raku.

By the turn of the century, it was clear that python 3 was a better plan for the future than perl 6.

[zahlman]

Mostly right, but

> By the turn of the century, it was clear that python 3 was a better plan for the future than perl 6.

Work on Python 3 wasn't even announced until 2006, and Perl 6 in 2000.

[BeetleB]

> it was respected by hackers for the joy it brought people who 'got' it

Isn't that the crux of the issue? Perl was great if you're a hacker who 'got' it. For the remaining 95% of the population, Python worked.

Lisp/Scheme are also beautiful to those who 'get' it.

> I still don't understand how it won, stealing the halo of a language while having nothing of the sort.

Plenty of people have already told you. 95% of programmers do programming to get the job done. The linguistics grad student I knew 20 years ago did his work in Python because it was easy (he had no programming background). He would have simply changed his thesis topic if Python didn't exist. He would not have learned Perl.

Perl was for hackers. Python was for everyone.

[dpark]

> Isn't that the crux of the issue? Perl was great if you're a hacker who 'got' it. For the remaining 95% of the population, Python worked.

It’s really not the crux of the issue though. “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages clear that bar whether they are successful or not. This is certainly not the only reason that Python became so successful.

Tangentially, in my experience Perl was great for one liners and small glue projects. I never saw significant, valuable works of code built in Perl even when I worked at a company (Yahoo) that widely used Perl. I am convinced that much of Perl’s beauty is in its cleverness and’s not in its utility for large projects.

[BeetleB]

> “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages clear that bar whether they are successful or not.

Dial the clock back to 2002, and this statement is not true. Perl became popular not because of its beauty, but because of it being extremely effective glue. It was a language to get stuff done while writing little code.

The only mainstream alternative was Python.

[dpark]

I see. There are two separate but related questions.

1. Why did Python replace Perl?

2. Why did Python become so extremely popular?

The answer to the first is because it’s better than Perl for so many engineers in so many cases. The answer to the second is much broader.

[dpark]

Did you seriously start this thread just to ask people to confirm your bias?

In that case, yes. Perl is beautiful. Python sucks and only succeeded because idiot developers couldn’t see the beauty of Perl. Python is poorly suited at every job except stealing potential Perl devs.

Feel better?

[Mawr]

No.

Readability, explicitness, one way to do things are examples of great design taste. Perl was the opposite of all that.