James wrote: > Most of the responses are of the "Why Python is more pleasant than C++" > variety, but the original poster specifically said he had experience > with Perl. As such, arguments like "automatic memory management" don't > carry any weight. > > >From my experience as both a Perl and Python user--and I do prefer Perl > for many tasks--the big win for Python is when you have complex data > structures: dictionaries containing arrays, arrays of arrays, array of > dictionaries, and so on. This kind of thing is awkward in Perl (you > need to use references), but perfectly natural and obvious in Python.
Well, I didn't know Perl when I was asked to teach a Web development class. I had heard that Perl was CGI standard... So I started to do some Perl and was aghast at what I needed to learn (I don't like special caracters that make code look like martian poetry). Then I read some articles pertaining to Python and CGI and look up that language (I had read a comment by a Java-C++ Guru, favorable to Python). Wow, I understood everything I was reading, and I could think of how other things might work, and by god, they did very often. Like some others have said elsewhere: Python fitted my brain! That's what made it special for me! and it still feel like this to this day! I hope it works for you, if not maybe some other one will (Ruby, Lua, Haskell, O'Caml, C# ;-) ) Never looked back since... -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
