http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=1179067

edit: I don't know enough to write a web server with the full stack, but a web application. corrected that typo
Now that I'm through the first semester and have three days to gather my bearings and prepare for the next one I decided to jot down some of my conclusions here.

When I heard that we would do networking and security related programming in python I was kinda miffed. As some here might now perl was my first scripting language and the fondness that I have for it is in no small part due to the number of libraries and the ease of building new things from them. And of course its wonderful way of handling text analysis.

After a day of two of brooding I decided to give it a go (really I didn't have any choice, still the teachers quips about me already being old for using perl bothered me quite a bit).
He did not say perl was useless mind you, he admitted to not having followed it's recent development and being mostly interested in the use of the scapy python library.

So here I went, full of expectations. I had heard much about python, how it was gentle on the beginner, object oriented and made you write nice code... How wrong I was.

Yes, you HAVE to indent. After I got to working on a project with someone else who (even after we discussed coding conventions) kept using tabs instead of a set number of spaces, I understood why so many people complained about the rigidity of obligatory indentation. I mean if I wanted to code in whitespace I'd have chosen whitespace. This is not a python problem but rather a programmer's own issues there, it didn't really bother me at any time, thanks to an airtight vimrc.

Now onto the next issue. Python will make you write nice code. I call bull on this one. Sure you'll have to indent your loops so they work but that won't make you write nice code. I have a hefty slab of absolutely unreadable UI code sitting in a repository on a university server to prove it.

Interface with other languages: I found doing C code unit testing in python very easy and I hear that calling java or c++ from python isn't that hard either, so that's a very good thing for me.

To sum it up I'm glad I've learned a bit of python this semester (enough to be able to code web applications, udp/tcp custom servers or simple AI algorithms) because it gave me another point of view on the topic of interpreted languages. I recommend anyone using perl to give python a try just to have that alternative point of view (the same way I'd recommend that any programmer use a functional language at least once just to see how it feels). but in the end? I think that for me perl's TIMTOWTDI approach is best, because it allows me to really express myself. I don't think it's the language's job to make me respect other programmer's work by sticking to discussed APIs and using coding standards. I do so by my own free will and what this semester has proven to me is that another neophyte can be using the exact same constraining language without giving a proverbial flying one about coding standards and end up with a steaming pile of unreadable code. Could have happened with perl too, albeit with a lot more $, @ and other #.