In my first response, I deliberately stayed away from any technical comparisons because they can easily degenerate into subjective personal preference: "Perl looks like line noise", "I hate the Python whitespace rules", and so on. Often such statements are made by programmers who know one language much better than the other. Especially irritating is the claim by people who hardly know Perl that it's "unreadable" -- to which, I normally reply that Russian is "unreadable" if you don't know Russian.
Anyway, my subjective opinion, FWIW. Perl, Python and Ruby can be used to accomplish the same sort of tasks. I've used all three and found all three to be a delight to use. They all have their warts, of course, and a differing set of strengths and weaknesses. For fun, I created a couple of nodes (Five Ways to Reverse a String of Words (C#, Perl 5, Perl 6, Ruby, Haskell) and Yet Another Rosetta Code Problem (Perl, Ruby, Python, Haskell, ...)) showing the same program written in various languages. I genuinely like Perl, Python and Ruby, so I don't really want to comment further. To hear other folk's opinions, you could always google for "Perl versus Python" -- there's certainly no shortage of opinions out there. :-)
In reply to Re^4: Perl holds its own against Python Ruby et al
by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Perl holds its own against Python Ruby et al
by Gavin
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