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A Mountain of Perl Books + Python Advocacy

Wayne Izatt wayne.izatt at myself.com
Wed Apr 5 04:21:54 EDT 2000 
Books are one thing, but a regular printed journal would be especially
useful. A journal is visible, creates a strong sense of community, and is
an easy way to combine advanced and general Python topics in one tight
package. I wonder what the minimum number of Pythoners it would take to
keep something like that afloat?

jm2cw

lewst wrote:

> Before I launch into another question and gripe, I'd like to thank
> everyone who offered comments and suggestions on the advanced Python
> books that are out there.
>
> Now something I can't quite figure out is: why are there so many more
> books on Perl out there than on Python?
>
> Searching through Fatbrain.COM (which is where I order my books from),
> I found 68 books, 4 training manuals, and 2 eMatter documents on Perl.
> Compare this to Python's 13 books and 2 eMatter documents.
>
> What is it about Perl that makes it so much more popular and have such
> a huge grassroots swell?  I personally find Perl an abomination and
> Python a breath of fresh air.  Perl has that first mover advantage I
> suppose, but should that really make such a hugh difference?
>
> I'll admit that Perl is what led me to Python in the first place.
> After hearing about how great Perl was several years ago from the
> local sysadmin, I learned it and started using it for my scripting
> needs.  If there is one thing that sums up my Perl experience, it is
> that it always took me too long write the programs that I needed to
> write.  The syntax was always no unnatural for me that I could never
> get my head out of the reference manual, and errors were always so
> tough to track down.  In the end was frustration albeit a working
> result.  This frustration led me to look into Python and I'll never
> touch Perl again.  Python was so natural for me I often found myself
> correctly "guessing" at the syntax as I learned it.  I rewrote all my
> Perl scripts in one weekend and most of them worked on the first try.
>
> At this point I wondered if my brain was just different than all those
> Perl junkies out there.  But now I really don't think so; I think it's
> a question of awareness.  Perl is very publicized and well-known while
> the better language is sitting here a dark corner unnoticed.  Sure
> there will always be some religious fanatics that won't even give
> Python a try, but I think Python's popularity could be vastly improved
> with some serious advocacy work.  CNRI and/or PSA should seriously
> look into funding a Python "marketing" campaign of sorts.  I think the
> result would be allot of converts and more understanding and respect
> for Python.
>
> With this in mind, let me include one of my favorite pro-Python quotes
> of all time.  This is from a message to the fetchmail-announce mailing
> list by Eric S. Raymond <http://tuxedo.org/~esr>, the famous
> open-source advocate and author of many popular software programs.  He
> is discussing "fetchmailconf" which is the Tkinter GUI for his
> fetchmail POP/IMAP mail client.  I think it demonstrates the point I
> make above perfectly.
>
>   "A note about fetchmailconf. It took me approximately six days to
>   write this elaborate multi-paneled GUI -- that's counting the four
>   days it took me to learn the implementation language in the process.
>   This could easily have been a two-month project in C (with six weeks
>   of that spent debugging and bugs still left).  Or a week-long
>   project in Perl, with working but ugly and unmaintainable results."
>
>   "The verdict: Python is *waaaay* cool!  I'm sold.  It's clean, it's
>   elegant, it's easy, and it's astonishingly powerful.  I'm not going
>   to program anything longer than one screenful of script in Perl
>   anymore.  I love Larry Wall dearly, but Guido van Rossum is the
>   better designer -- I haven't had this much fun with a language since
>   the glory days of LISP.  Eric sez check it out."
>
> Regards.
>
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