A the joys of programming, there are so many to choose from and my interest in a recent Slashdot article on the TIOBE Programming Community Index was raised due to a couple of small “home” projects I’ve recently managed to complete. Firstly the movers and shakers on this months Programming Community Index list were
1. Java
2. C
3. (Visual) Basic
4. PHP
5. C++
6. Perl
7. Python
8. C#
9. Ruby
10.Delphi
For me there are certainly a couple of surprises in there, but for now I have some comments on the Perl / Python tussle.
So my home project was a “script” to read out (using a ‘text-to-speech’ program) a Quote of the Day from a RSS feed.
I’ve had this QOTD feed on my feedreader account for years but never seem to get a chance to read them, now I just have them read out for me once a day.
Having completed the project in Python [9 lines of code and an imported library feedparser] I wondered why does Python exist? Shouldn’t Perl do the job perfectly fine?
Many suggestions are offered, such as Pythons readability and extensibility, or the fact that Python offers much faster application development, and for me I wanted to see if this was true ……. and my experience is born true by this article from the Linux Journal on Why Python? by Eric Raymond [May, 2000] although my disclaimer is that if you manage to read the comments I’m a 3).
Finally back to the ‘Quote of the Day’, as a network programmer I should have been thinking about doing this project with the Quote Of The Day (QOTD) protocol, utilising a service provider like http://quotes4all.net/ but then I’m not so sure Python would have come up on my radar, if I had started out like this.