I've just read a very thoughtful description of why one Perl programmer switched to Python. In this blog post, I'll explain why I did not.

When I started on the Marpa project, Perl was not an automatic choice. In fact it looked like it might be the wrong one. There was as much buzz for Python then as now. Maybe more. I'd had my own experience with Python, and it was excellent. I'd used Python to create a threaded mail client for testing purposes. I found P…

Is the Perl interpreter psychic?

is the handling of parse-time errors. It's often overlooked. Perl's use of LALR based parsing puts severe limits on its ability to locate errors, limits which the Perl interpreter is sometimes able to overcome. Consider the following erroneous piece of code.

my $lyric =
'Sloopy wears a red dress, yeah
As old as the hills
but when sloopy wears that red dress, yeah
you know it gives me the chills
Sloopy when I see you walking, 
walking down …