Maintenance issues aside, if you want an "empirical" study comparing perl to python, as well as C/C++ and Java, check the following link: http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/cgi-bin/psview?document=/ira/2000/5 It's the only article I've seen like it.
If you're serious about making unmaintainable code check out the following: http://mindprod.com/unmain.html ;-) Ilya Martynov wrote:
D> | You can write obfuscated programs with any language, even with python. D> | The programmer should use the language (any language, not just perl or D> | python) resources judiciously to improve readability and D> | maintainability. D> This is true, though I've found obfuscated python to be rather D> difficult to create due to it's indentation rules (whitespace is D> significant). However, someone on c.l.py used parenthesis to work D> around the rules and made a cute program that printed a christmas D> tree, but only after christmas, not before. Check the mailing list's D> archives if you want to see it. Obfuscated programs doesn't means only bad identation. Bad programmers always can use stupid names for variables, methods, classes, etc. They can have non-trivial program flow and so on. It all applies to Python too. D> | Perl allows one to write both procedural and OO programs. Perl OO model D> | is very simple, flexible and powerful. D> I've heard that perl added an object model recently, and I've also D> heard that it isn't very good. Both are hearsay as I have no D> experience with perl's object model. I think someone once said that D> perl tried to follow python's object model as an example, but again D> that is not a hard fact. Perl OO model is good enough to be able write *very* big programs using OO methodology. And anyways Python is far from ideal if you want clean consistent object oriented scripting langauge. If you need it your choice should be Ruby. Personally I think that Perl and Python are equal in some way. Both languages does not have strong advantages againts each other. I don't belive that any project that written in Perl can be made faster and better in Python and vice versa. There is just exist some differences in concepts that make some people fill more confortable with one of them.
