Maybe it's me but I don't get it. I get the meme, but please explain to me why python is considered so much easier than other languages.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it is interpreted and the toolkit that it attracts, not the language itself. Having something that's interpreted and as someone normalize grammar, that's the attraction to python. The look of the language is much more forced as well. (No K&R versus ANSI debates)
If Perl wasn't so junky/hacky, perl would still be a major language and probably a lot faster. I like Perl a lot by the way so I'm kind of beating up my own language of choice.
Python originally wasn't a typed language. You didn't have to declare variables, you could just use them, and that got a lot of squinting out of the way for people who just wanted to do things. And it had lists, which were a complicated object masquerading as a simple one. And you didn't need functions, not even main(), so you could write a file that acted as a script but was cleaner than all the scripted languages, which were hamstringed by a long history of being slowly evolved from commands typed into a shell prompt.
There was no compiling and linking, and there was a lot of complex stuff built in so there was very little including.
Now, though, Python is pretty complex itself, you have to include a lot, and often you're compiling because you're using it for something serious and it needs to be performant, and versioning can easily bite you in the ass.
Perl was the OG alternative that filled exactly the slot between compiled and shell-scripted programming that Python now owns, but it had a habit of being arcane, with even more syntactic conjuring than Python now does. And it was fast as fuck. If it was as easy to pick up as Python was originally it probably would have kept Python at bay. I think Larry was more controlling than Guido, too, on top of open source not being as mature a community, so it didn't evolve nearly as fast.
One of the things I actually loved about Perl was its philosophy of TMTOWTDI — “There’s More Than One Way To Do It.” It made Perl incredibly expressive and powerful, but it also let you shoot yourself in the foot.
Python deliberately went almost the opposite direction: “There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.”
That difference matters more than people sometimes realize. Perl was very much a write-first language. If you were disciplined, you could write some incredibly elegant Perl. I was always able to come back to my own code six months later and understand it. But the language didn't force much structural discipline on you, so two Perl programmers could solve the same problem in completely different ways—and neither solution necessarily looked obvious to somebody else.
Python's philosophy makes the codebase itself more consistent. You give up some of Perl's freedom and cleverness in exchange for code that is much easier for the next person to read.
As a manager, though, I'd probably choose Python. With Perl, you could end up with a codebase where understanding the software meant understanding the mindset of the developers who wrote it. Every team, site, or even individual programmer could develop its own conventions for how things were done. It was almost democratic: the language gave everyone enormous freedom, and the resulting code reflected the people who wrote it. That's great for individual expression, but terrible for organizational continuity. With Python, the language itself imposes more of the culture. There are still different ways to write Python, but the language strongly nudges everyone toward the same conventions. That means somebody can walk into a codebase without first having to learn the personality and philosophy of every developer who touched it. From a management perspective, that's a huge advantage: you aren't just managing code; you're managing the cost of replacing the people who understand it.
I also loved it because it kind of enforced most of the Pearl was in the executable. It's weird but I worked at two shops where the sis admin were terrible. Every time that I invoked python something was not properly installed where is as long as I used Perl native calls, I still could actually get my code to work. It's amazing that you had to code around the system but perl is more resistant to non-standard installations or breakages of the packages
Python originally wasn't a typed language. You didn't have to declare variables, you could just use them,
Perhaps not so ironically, this is what makes Python unsuitable for large projects. I’d rather work on large C++ codebase than large Python codebase. (Yes, I know Python has type hints, but once you start using dependencies, you discover how much of a mess type hints are).
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u/ubd12 2d ago
Maybe it's me but I don't get it. I get the meme, but please explain to me why python is considered so much easier than other languages.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it is interpreted and the toolkit that it attracts, not the language itself. Having something that's interpreted and as someone normalize grammar, that's the attraction to python. The look of the language is much more forced as well. (No K&R versus ANSI debates)
If Perl wasn't so junky/hacky, perl would still be a major language and probably a lot faster. I like Perl a lot by the way so I'm kind of beating up my own language of choice.