Difference Between Perl and Python

Perl vs Python

Perl and Python are both scripting languages that are meant to produce little scripts that can be used for different applications. Perl is already an old established scripting language that has garnered wide support due to its comprehensive collection of UNIX libraries. Because of the maturity of Perl, you can find and download a lot of modules that were created by the Perl community. In contrast, Python is relatively new but it has garnered a lot of attention due to its unorthodox way of doing things.

The thing that you would easily notice when looking at Perl and Python code is the lack of braces in the code of Python. In Perl, braces are used to group statements together into a unified block. This is the norm for programming languages and most use the same or some other character. Python breaks convention by using the change in indentation to indicate the start or the end of the block. Changing indentations for every new block is already a common practice for most programmers and the makers of Python saw the braces as redundant.

Python is also more intuitive when it comes to the code and a lot of experts say that Python is easier to learn and pick-up even for beginners. Perl can be a bit complex and confusing as the keywords that you need often don’t actually correspond to the task you had in mind. This problem might not seem very relevant when you are coding small programs but as you start going into bigger programs that needs a lot of code.

As it gets more difficult to write code for bigger programs, it also follows that errors in code are very likely to appear. It would be a lot more difficult to debug Perl code than Python code as your programs get bigger as the minor problems that seems trivial at the beginning gets amplified more and you end up struggling with your own code. The elegant design of Python minimizes this problem and lets you create nicely built scripts.

Summary:
1.Perl is a lot older than Python and has a much wider selection modules available.
2.Perl uses the traditional braces to mark statement blocks while Python uses the indentation for the same purpose.
3.Python code is intuitive and easier to learn compared to Perl.
4.Perl is harder to handle and debug compared to Python when the code starts to grow.

Sharing is caring!