I think that in their early years the then small Python community oriented themselves a lot at the Perl and copied concepts, like the hatred against PHP.

Like all new religious movements they needed to position themselves against the established competition, and this was ingrained into the believe.

Christianity did this with Judaism (godkiller, etc.), the Quran speaks at long length where Christianity went wrong.

And Python like Islam has the tendency of claiming to have the final truth, the seal of the prophets.

I remember seeing a blog-post of the angry backslash when the Ruby-folks tried to imitate those anti memes but now against Python.

Having a boogeyman is very useful for a movement.

The "paradox" is that the most vocal enemies are often the least competent. Many people which have abysmally small know how are the biggest "zealots" - another religious term BTW.

Nobody likes to admit he's incompetent, but the "pre-formatted" Python syntax is visually more likely appealing to any static data-type (Java etc) programmer, and by imitating the anti-Perl "credo" they can pretend to be experts.

I had my aha-moment when I met this team-leader who hated Perl and told me at long length why he loved Java for its strictness and bash for it's flexibility. It didn't make much sense.

My theological 2cents. :)

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the 𐍀𐌴𐍂𐌻 Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

In reply to Re^9: Google considers Perl a useful skill by LanX
in thread Google considers Perl a useful skill by reisinge

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