Interview with Larry Wall
"Perl has always considered itself primarily a programmer-centric language, while Python has always considered itself to be more institution-centric. So in a sense it's a bit dumbed down, much like Java. You'll note both of those languages make their greatest appeal to managers. :-) "<p>Huh?  I was using Python when Perl was more popular, and this seems completely fabricated.  He's trying to lump Python in with Java, which is bizarre because those 2 camps have pretty big philosophical differences.<p>I think that the main reason that Python became more popular because it has both clearer syntax and clearer semantics than Perl.  It is compact AND readable -- not just compact.  The data structures in Python also behave more like those you would see in a CS textbook.<p>I'm working on my own language, and I just read over the Camel Book ("Learning Perl").  Honestly I don't see much in there that I want to borrow, except maybe for ~= automatically introducing variables.  What else is good about Perl, which is<p><pre><code>    1) not in Python/Ruby/JavaScript (like hash tables)
    2) overly terse/clever?
</code></pre>
(Honest question)<p>Perl's regex syntax seems to be it's biggest influence and legacy, with Python/Ruby/Java/PCRE all adopting its syntax.<p>And -e in Perl is also useful -- Python/Ruby/etc. aren't really good for one liners like Perl.  This provides a nice gateway into the language.<p>But a lot of other features were rightly ignored by other languages IMO.<p>Also, with regard to the previous sentence, I actually consider Python OO kind of weak, but it's definitely better than Perl's AFAICT.