[cumbria_lug] To Python, or not to Python?

[Luke Antins]

Rosalind Mitchell wrote:
> I'm not in a hurry.  I like working in Perl and I had a crack at Ruby
> for a while and that's nice but I still prefer Perl.
>    
What didn't you like about Ruby? It's supposedly 'like Perl', but I never
properly wrapped my head around Perl to comment on that :-)

I've been playing with Ruby for over 2 years now I think?
And as of the last 6 months I've been using it for all my work projects and loving it!
Previously my main language was PHP, so not too difficult to improve upon? :p

Right now I've got a bunch of Ruby based web services running, and some servers that deal with data
coming in over a socket (very quickly!!!)

> But is there a good reason for learning Python?  And would anybody like
> to try to convince me of its merits over Perl?
>    
It's always a good idea to learn a new language every once and a while?

I've played with Python, but only a little. It just didn't click with me.
At this time I was just getting to grips with the basics of Ruby, so I think
the main thing that put me off was trying to learn more then one language at once.

I'll definitely be giving it another looksee when I have time.

Dave will hopefully be able to enlighten us all to the holey-ness that is Python, as I understand he's quite a big user of it these days ;-)

Luke