I'm only vaguely familiar with Python; what about it makes it increasingly popular?

• Google apparently prefer Python to Perl as a development language. The Google App Engine currently only supports Python. They also hired Guido van Rossum and Alex Martelli.
• Microsoft seem more interested in Python than Perl as a .NET language.
• High profile Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth supports Python and apparently wants to move towards making Python the de-facto programming language on the Ubuntu Linux desktop.
• The one laptop per child project chose Python.

Update (2023): Now that Guido has left Google for Microsoft will we see Python adoption rising at Microsoft and falling at Google?

So what's making Perl decline? Ship-jumpers, bad press (e.g., press that compares Python to Perl and asserts that Python is better)?

Gavin's "political" reasons definitely would suggest a lot of power...sufficient to drive the changes, IMO.

I'm still curious about the language reasons(i.e., technical reasons) from the Monk's who are more versed in Python that I am. I tried to learn it about 2 years ago...but got bored and kept wanting to get back to my beloved Perl. I'm definitely settling into the 'old dog' stage of my career (and life, probably).

ack Albuquerque, NM

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. :-)