Re: What are the relative advantages of Python and Tcl?

Steven D. Majewski (sdm7g@elvis.med.Virginia.EDU)
Tue, 5 Apr 1994 20:48:13 GMT

In article <1994Apr4.193552.28312@netlabs.com>,
Larry Wall <lwall@netlabs.com> wrote:
>
>Certainly, though it's unclear whether this is viewed by the respective
>authors as three separate ecological niches or as merely imperfect
>occupation of a single ecological niche. There certainly does seem to be
>a tendency for these languages to converge, or at least to steal--er, uh,
>I mean, borrow ideas from each other.

Until the whole world has standardized on MicroTrash and the Heat Death
of the Software Universe arrives ( 35 degrees EVERYWHERE! ), I'm happy
that we have room for competing species and evolution!

I think Perl, Tcl, Python ( and Dylan, REXX, Elk, et.al. ) all *started* with
a somewhat different job in mind, but there is increasing convergence with
increasing generality. ( And I think a little friendly competition has
been a good incentive. )

There are still some domains where one or the other language has a clear
superiority, ( I still use Perl for a lot of unix sysadmin tasks, but
I think Python was a good choice for UVA's Virtual Reality research )
but there are a lot of cases where it's just a matter of style
and preference - what feels comfortable. However - the increasing
generality comes from the fact that once one *IS* comfortable, change
and difference is a pain-in-the-neck! I am currently using xlisp-stat
and S for some interactive statistics, and I find myself wishing I
could use Python instead - however, I don't have the time to
immediately convert all of the support code those languages have into
Python. But someday ...

>
>But hey, I voted for comp.lang.python...
>

Hey, I still read comp.lang.perl...

- Steve Majewski (804-982-0831) <sdm7g@Virginia.EDU>
- UVA Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics