On Mon, 2009-06-15 at 10:04 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote: > > Also, there are several engineers at Red Hat that are very unhappy with > > the impact that the 3.0 release is going to have on them. > > Yes but it has been obvious for a long time that python does not > consider backwards compatibility to be important. This shouldn't have > come as a surprise. By comparison, perl has been around longer and Judging by some of the comments on the fedora-devel list, it did anyway. > through more changes and yet about the only thing you might have to > check on a program written for perl 1.x to run under 5.x would be > whether you have @ in double-quoted strings that you wanted to remain > literal. I used to do a lot of coding in perl, but I found that I liked python better. I still like python for quick and dirty one-offs, but I'm not going to use it for large and persistent projects. > One other consideration is that perl probably has the current advantage > in terms of available code library modules. Pretty much anything you > can imagine doing has already been done and contributed to CPAN so often > the code you have to write yourself is trivial with the modules doing > the bulk of the work. Java may be catching up in this regard but I > don't think there is a central place to find available code. Google? ;) I guess the real question is how well java is going to prosper under Oracle's ownership. Then again, with openjdk, it might not matter too much. Dave