Five Standard Deviations: Transitioning from Perl to Python

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Transitioning from Perl to Python

I'm excited. I'm taking a Python class tomorrow. At the same time, I'm a little loathe to give be cheating on my long time girlfriend Perl. Things will be different, but hopefully better in the long run.

One thing I'm hooked on is Perl's regular expressions. Nick Craig-Wood explains that regular expressions in Python are more clunky but...

Having made the transition from perl to python a couple of years ago, I find myself using regexpes much less.  In perl everything looks like it needs a regexp, but python has a much richer set of string methods, eg .startswith, .endswith, good subscripting and the nice "in" operator for strings.
So hopefully things will be ok.

1 comment:

DemonApril 4, 2009 at 7:20 AM
Perl is the best scripting language for Text processing and handle regex. I have posted few articles related to those at my blog

http://icfun.blogspot.com/search/label/perl

Also Perl's Cpan has lots of support that I don't even need to think extra while developing project. I didn't find such help on other programming language except Java and .NET
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What is this?

A friend of mine once told me I was "five standard deviations from the mean [1]." That might have been a put-down to some, but it filled me with glee. I get a perverse sense of validation from being unique.

But being unique also poses some problems. It means that most products are not made with your priorities in mind. It means more work on your part to find the goods and services that are right for you.

That's where this blog comes in. I am hoping that there are a few people out there can identify with my weirdness and benefit from my findings.

[1] Roughly speaking, this means being more different from average/normal than 99.99994267% of all people.