PhizzleDizzle Is Right

Python is a lot more intuitive than Perl. Perl is all twisted up in contractions and brackets and weird contractions whereas Python has just a few punctuation sets and very clear functional parsing. I spent 3h on a Python tutorial and have managed to write scripts that I haven't been able to write even after a couple months of casually studying Perl. The only non-intuitive thing I've found in Perl so far has been trying to link an operation inside of a "while" loop to a condition set outside the loop. With this, it took me about 40min to figure out what was wrong with my script to ask for numbers one at a time until the sum was 100 or greater, because the loop kept quitting after 2 numbers. I think I've got it now.

Bonus: Python can do more than just parse text files. This has been one of my frustrations with Perl so far, I could write a little script to change all the "ae" in a text document to "ä", but when it came to actual utility it was kind of limited. I have no doubt that Perl is useful for large-scale Internet applications, I now think that Python might be a more useful skill to develop. I'm not going to give up completely on Perl, but for the moment Python suits my curiosities much better. There's even a serial.py module that let's Python talk to micro-controllers!

So yes, Phizzle Dizzle was right. Python seems to be just as powerful, more intuitive, and offer a much shallower and less painful learning curve. Also, the IDLE Python GUI is quite nice.