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.
Mostly because libraries. And yeah, Perl was the forerunner with CPAN.
Oh shit, I need to ssh into a cisco router, run some commands, and capture the results. Oh look, somebody already wrote the package.
Perl is kind of faster to write in because shelling out is so simple. Read a file? Yeah, you could open a file, read lines, close file, or you could
@lines = `cat <filename>`;
There's a lot of little niceties though, like negative indices on arrays, specifying ranges to get subsets of an array, etc. And large number support, and dynamic typing, f strings, built in sets, dicts, etc.
I miss Perl's DBI. There was something magic about doing testing with csv files and then just changing the driver and adding some line to log in, and poof now it's using a proper db.
The quality and stability of a lot of Perl packages was so good, and the documentation. Metacpan, docs all in one place and a good clear convention of usage examples and raw API documented. Plus all the automated testing infrastructure.
Coming from Perl, the state of the js package Eco system was so crap. Npm docs that were really poor and inconsistent, so many packages with their own bloated websites for docs. And packages like passport that only have this God damn convention / example based documentation, and don't just have an api reference. Cannot stand that.
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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.