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A Mountain of Perl Books + Python Advocacy

lewst lewst at yahoo.com
Wed Apr 5 01:39:20 EDT 2000 
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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