RE: Python or Perl for a Debian maintainance project?

["Julian Mehnle" <lists@mehnle.net>]

Matthias Urlichs wrote:
> Python.
> 
> My main reason for this statement, entirely subjective but based on
> personal experience: 
> 
> Every error whatsoever throws an exception. That's far better from a
> quality POV than to check the error return of _every_single_statement_,
> because (a) nobody actually programs that way, and (b) if you actually
> do program that way your code will be twice as long and ten times as
> unreadable. 

That's true, but there's no reason not to use exceptions in Perl.  They're even built-in, although you eccentrically (or shall I say, exceptionally) raise them with `die`, and catch them with `eval {}` -- and yes, that *is* efficient.  As syntactic sugar, you may want to use the CPAN module "Error", though.

> Check out [1]ESR's experience, it pretty much matches mine.
> [1] http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3882

In his article, Eric asks the question "what has [Python] got that Perl does not?".  But essentially, he only criticizes Perl's syntax ("readability") and absent compactness ("there's more than one way to do it"), and even that is debatable.