Slightly off topic...

Posted Jan 3, 2006 2:04 UTC (Tue) by danielthaler (guest, #24764) [Link]

Oh, I use perl for quick'n dirty scripts, too. They tend to get extremely messy once they grow beyond "small" (say 100 lines or so).

I don't know python either, but I intend to learn: I like that it looks so much cleaner.

Besides, it bugs me that perl development has effectively stopped. Perl6 must be closely related to Duke Nukem Forever...

Posted Jan 3, 2006 18:00 UTC (Tue) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

You may find The Year in Perl 2005 an interesting read:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/8894

Posted Jan 4, 2006 13:30 UTC (Wed) by copsewood (subscriber, #199) [Link]

There's still plenty of good stuff around in Perl and you have to use
Perl to maintain/improve/learn it. In my case I need to get my head further into SpamAssassin. You'd probably learn Python in a couple of days though. Having used Perl before I learned Python, I now prefer the latter and can get a lot more work done in Python more quickly if I know a new program is going to grow to more than 100 lines of code. I still use Perl occasionally for new programs which are not going to need more than 20 lines of code or maintaining, e.g. where the regex or file globbing syntax makes the job a little bit easier, and bash/sed/awk/grep would be too messy. Also understanding someone elses Python is a lot quicker for me than understanding someone else's Perl - GNU Mailman being easier for me to read and understand, for example, than SpamAssassin.