I used to be a Perl hacker. I confess I’ve forgotten a lot of the zen since, and nowadays I’m more a PHP guy (or MATLAB). But I’ve been hearing a lot about Python (ever since the infamous Parrot April Fool’s joke). The XKCD comic excerpted below got me thinking though that maybe I should get familiar with it in a more formal sense. Anyone out there use Python regularly? How does it compare, as a scripting language, to Perl? How does it compare, as a web application language, to PHP?
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Ah, religious wars.
Which is better, the PC or the Mac?
Which is better, Vi or EMACS?
Python versus PHP is another one of those. Perhaps honest answers exist, but they’ll be drowned out by the religious zealots…
actually, most of the people I know who code in Python started out in php – theres a large overlap. and i’ve heard that php is still dominant for webapps (though perl is being eclipsed on the scripting front). so its more of a toolbox/job question than a religious war, I hope.
if not, though, i’m up for a good flamewar
I’ll just watch and enjoy 
I’ve done quite a bit of Python coding, with very little Perl. In my day job, I’m an architect for a subset of a Java-based softswitch (Around 15K .java files).
Perl always looked like too much line noise or shell script for my taste. I have been able to re-examine a large Python application after a year and understand it almost immediately, which I am rarely able to do with shell or awk.
I think that http://www.poromenos.org/tutorials/python? provides a good overview of Python.