[Zope] Slightly Off-topic Python Question

[Ken Manheimer]

Jon Jaques wrote:

> Sorry to post this off-topic message to the group, but in evaluating
Zope,
> I've come "up against" Python, and, being somewhat of a Perlmonger, am
> trying to decide if and why I should use Python.

See http://www.python.org/doc/Comparisons.html - while you may have some
questions about comparisons hosted at the python site, the first one in
the perl/python section is by tom christiansen - that should be
reassuring.-)  For a pretty incisive description of the relative
strengths you should check the comparison essay by Guido van Rossum,
python's author, linked in at the top of the comparisons page.  It has a
small section on python vis a vis perl.

> Now, I'm not trying to engage in any language wars or anything, but I
was
> wondering if anybody might know of a matrix somewhere that compares
the two
> languages.

I really hope it *doesn't* spark a language conflagration - they're
rarely if ever useful.  

> I have downloaded Python documentation, and am looking it over, and so
far I
> have not seen any compelling reasons to use it beyond Zope, so if
anybody
> knows of any (such as performance), then I'd appreciate hearing about
it!

Gee, that's a hard question to answer.  Rather than risk a language war,
why don't you give it a try, and see what you find?  Just reading some
docs doesn't really give you a feel for a language.  (The comparisons
may help pinpoint some things, though.)

Incidentally, i recall that someone from the perl part of the recent
o'reilly open source conference was saying how perl needed something
like zope to better handle the cgi domain.  I'm wondering if thats what
brought your attention to Zope?  

In any case, you may find getting acquainted with python to be a nice
side benefit.  There are some striking internal similarities between
python and perl - which makes some of the overt syntactic and data
structural - and ultimately, deep design-ethic differences all the more
striking.  If nothing else, it should be interesting to get a feel for
the ramifications of those different design decisions.

Ken Manheimer
klm@digicool.com