You said: "...I've always been impressed that the Inkscape team supports languages other than Python."
Maybe I'm just a little bit paranoid. I remember a kind of "war" ten or twenty years ago between pro-Python and pro-Perl camps... In fact, I don't know at all how it is today, but I saw recent threads of someone showing Python code and saying "You see : it's much more clearer without all those $ and % everywhere!"
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but I saw recent threads of someone showing Python code and saying "You see : it's much more clearer without all those $ and % everywhere!"
As is often the case, perceptions and preferences are influenced by what you already know.
My first (high level) programming language was a dialect of BASIC that uses $ as a sigil for variables. Also, many Linux/Unix/POSIX command shells, such as bash, ash, csh, sh and more, use $ the same way. I also learned C.
So, given Perl syntax is very similar to C syntax and I was already used to using sigils in shell scripts, learning Perl was comfortable and easy for me.
Python, however, uses whitespace as punctuation. While some would argue that forcing programmers to correctly indent their is s good thing, BUT, whitespace is a minefield of trouble (what you see is not necessarily what it appears to be). Hopefully, Python's parser now includes detection of "mixed whitespace" and will issue a warning when detected.
Aside from "whitespace as syntax", Python syntax differs in other subtle ways that make it less comfortable for me than Perl.
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