Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Slides for Matt Biddulph’s speech “Python for Perl programmers” are a quick and easy way for Perl programmer to learn main differences between Perl and Python. Few code exmaples and quotes for the maestros are also included.

Once in a while I need to write a couple of lines in Python. When that happens I histerically run around the web looking for some quick introduction or tutorial on the language. There are plenty of those, of course. But just to have something handy, I’ll put a link here to Dive Into Python. What is so different about this tutorial is that it is very practical. There are many examples of code and very little explanations and theoretical crap that everyone knows already or can guess from the code. Simply use table of contents and jump to the needed part, where example awaits for you. Great!

There is an article at kuro5hin.net called “Switching from PHP to Zope/Python“. This should provide for an interesting read for all those poor PHP souls.

As for me - I use Perl and I am not planning to change any time soon. There are two major bonuses in Perl for my programming tasks:

1. CPAN - Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. This is a huge collection of modules that help me to avoid as much programming as possible. And that’s pretty much.
2. Perl’s scalability to all sorts of tasks. I am using Perl for one-line long utility scripts, log analyzing, mail searching, graph building, database maintenance, web programming and anything else that pops up. The broadness of tasks makes PHP way underpowered and Java way too complex. There are tools that might come handy (like Python), but why change if Perl works for me?

Said that, I am familiar with other languages, since it’s not rare at all that I need to patch someone else’s code. PHP being a widely used language for web development comes to my hands pretty often. My Python familiarity is more on the system level and GUI programming.