Slashdot | Guido Goes Google: "I can't speak for anyone else, but I did make the leap from perl to Python, and have no regrets.

I still use perl for quick-and-dirty text-processing and so forth, but Python is excellent for creating scripts you want to be able to maintain later. The syntax is sparse (compared to most other languages), so there isn't as much code to maintain. I found most of my favorite perl features were also represented (foreach, regular expressions, etc.)

People who've never spent much time with Python will gripe about the whitespace. It was never an issue for me, and I've never had problems with it.

If you plan to do any significant object-oriented programming, Python is very good for that. For procedural programs, the only edge it has over perl is readability, due to the concise syntax.

One thing to keep in mind with Python, however, is that it does NOT convert between numbers and strings automatically, while perl does. It's no big deal to cast a number as a str() or cast a string as int(), but if you don't know about it beforehand, it will get you.

From what I understand, Python is also very nice for metaprogramming, but I've never used it for that. I have used it for quick command-line utilities, GUI apps (with wxPython), and game programming. The object-oriented features are really why I prefer it over perl. They are intuitive, and you have a lot of power over how the objects behave in various circumstances.

If you have any C# experience, I've found you can port C# code to Python with only minor (mostly cosmetic) changes. (This obviously excludes using libraries written for C#, though--I was referring to the syntax of the code itself as being easily ported.)

Sorry if this explanation wasn't technical enough. I was just trying to lay out the general reasons I found a move from perl to Python relatively painless"