Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I’m learning Python (and it’s my first programming language so don’t be too intense with your reasons) and I wanted to know how it stacks up to other scripting languages, like Perl and Ruby. What is Python better in comparison to other scripting languages, and what is it worse for?
First off, an advice – look for POSITIVE things said from opposite sides. Meaning, you should trust positive things said about Perl by Python-related sources (or positive things said about Python by Perl related sources) much more than the opposite.
The two reasons are that:
1) People who have reason to like Python would NOT be inclined to say good things about Perl unless they were truly trying to be objective (which is what you ideally want). And vice versa – it’s a problem with human biases and motivations, NOT with either Perl or Python.
2) People writing such comparisons favoring one language are VERY often completely mis-informed and not very practiced about the one they are unfavorable about. As evidence see this article: http://python.about.com/od/gettingstarted/ss/whatispython_5.htm – pretty much anything it has to say about Perl is, to put it gently and mildly, a comlpete and utter bunk. I’m sure there are equally moronic Python put-downs from Perl fans, I just never read enough about Python to be able to think one up off the top of my head.
Second, please be aware that, at least for Perl – and I strongly suspect, for Ruby and Python – the moniker of “scripting” language is not really applicable anymore.
Yes, their (especially Perl’s) origins are somewhat connected to shell scripting, and yes, a small subset of the languages capabilities can be – and are – used to write shell scripts, and make that small task very easy and extremely productive.
However, at this point in its long history, Perl is in no way even remotely restricted to those capabilities, and is used for developing anything from scripts to web frameworks to servers to large scale enterprise software to bio-informatics software.
Third, please look at this – it has a lot of links:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/LanguageComparisons