Is There a 'Modern Perl' for Python? | Hacker News Reader

Is There a 'Modern Perl' for Python?

16 pointsreachbrian7 comments

I am a big fan of chromatic's Modern Perl. Is there a similar modern treatment of how to learn and write idiomatic Python?

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I think modern perl was (is) all about standardizing on what frameworks and conventions to use. It was a unifying of ideas.

I suppose for python, with its motto of 'one way to do it', doesn't suffer from a need to unify.

That is one of the reasons I have never been able to pick up either ruby or python. I just find them boring.

I was given the chance to take over some ruby projects at work recently. I powered through some popular ruby and rails books over the weekends, not in an attempt to learn ruby, but trying to learn cool hacks with it. You know, stuff to impress people with. The 'hubris' that perl people love. And well, I couldn't find any.

That's fair enough. That said, I like Ruby (and have all but abandoned Perl for it) because you can be productive without having to learn cool hacks.

At our Portland Ruby meetup we used to have "Ruby Hangman." You might enjoy working through some of the old puzzles:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/pdxruby/hangman

It is a bit like Perl Golf, although the desired number of characters is known beforehand.

Not familiar with Modern Perl, and I guess you could call 2007 not modern... but check out http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/han...

Python has far less need for such a thing because there's a lot less cruft, thanks to a greater willingness to deprecate (particularly in v3) and the policy of "there should be one way to do it".

in this way, we could say Python philosophy is opposite to Perl's. If in Python motto is 'There should be one way to do it', Perl always was 'There is more than one way to do it' (timtoady).

I'm a big fan of PHPTheRightWay as a primer, so I'd kind of would love to see the same thing for Python. Helps get folks up to speed.

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