The Guru

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, May 27, 2008, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 10:42:56AM -0400, Fairlight wrote:
>> I'd consider changing to Python (or at least exploring it) if it weren't
>> for the time investment that would be lost in having learned Perl.  Already
>> did that once when I (mostly) dropped C.  There's also the question of
>> losing access to the vast resources of CPAN, which are both significant and
>> overrated at the same time.  I say overrated, because as with SourceForge,
>> too many modules see a pre-alpha or an alpha, and then you never hear from
>> the authors again.  There's a lot of semi-useless crap out there to sort
>> through. 
>
>Python has it's own, much smaller, library called (I think) PEAR -- or
>maybe that's PHP's.  But keep in mind that with the upcoming April-Fool
>inspired Grand Unificaation, you'll probably be able to use CPAN
>modules from Python anyway.

PEAR is php.

The standard python library is quite comprehensive, and I rarely
have to go looking for extra python stuff compared to going to
CPAN quite frequently to get things.

	http://docs.python.org/lib/lib.html

A basic difference between python and perl is that python doesn't
have a lot loaded by default, while perl loads the kitchen sink.
In python one imports only what your script needs.  Most scripts
I do ``import os, sys, re'' near the top to get the basic things
I use in pretty much any scripts (os -- POSIX utilities, sys --
is system specific, and re -- regular expressions (perl compatible).

Bill
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Hint for the answer: not everything is computer-oriented. Sometimes you're
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(Contributed by Frans van der Zande.)