Perl has been my programming language of choice for quite some time now. I haven’t put enough time into it be be a very good programmer, but I have been slowly making progress. Lately however, I find myself considering using python instead.

So why did I choose Perl in the first place?

I was steered into Perl by a very knowledgeable mate of mine who has always been there to help me nut out some of my teething problems along the way. Syntax wise there are a few things that I really like about Perl. Things like variables, hashes and arrays  are always prefixed with a ‘$’, ‘%’, and @ symbols respectively and blocks of code are encapsulated in curly brackets. This makes my simple code much easier to read. Unfortunately the same syntax joy can cause syntax heartache too. Perl can be a real nightmare to read, especially after going back to your code after a month or two.

Then why Python?

Python is meant to be a lot easier to code with. Sometimes I find myself fighting with a piece of Perl for hours and getting no-where. I am hoping that Python might help me with this problem (at least a little bit ). The research I have been doing shows that a majority of Perl users that take the time to learn Python end up using Python as their preferred language. Then if you look at the number of large organizations that are using Python, handy tools such as Scapy and the speed of which Python is taking off in popularity and the choice seems fairly clear.

I will miss my curly bracket bounding and pretty variables, but hopefully the feeling of this shortfall will be short lived. Perl will always have a soft spot in my heart so I don’t think I will ever be able to leave it entirely.

I have the O’Reilly book ‘Learning Python‘ by Mark Lutz and have whipped through the first 4 chapters… so far so good.Although we still haven’t gotten to actually coding anything yet :S

I’ll keep you posted

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