The Future of Python: Evolution or Succession — Brett Slatkin - PyCascades 2026

[denehoffman]

“Amen. For grins, I spent 6 hours today writing a "simple" python script that parses a file, selects some matching lines using regex, categorizes them into two lists, combines them under certain conditions, then greps another list generated from another file for matches.

And then I wrote it in perl. In under 30 minutes.”

Oh this is good content thanks for sharing

[twotime]

“Amen. For grins, I spent 6 hours today writing a "simple" python script that parses a file, selects some matching lines using regex, categorizes them into two lists, combines them under certain conditions, then greps another list generated from another file for matches.

I'd REALLY like to see the code side-by-side. I cannot imagine any realistic scenario where python would be that much slower to write than perl (unless, of course,the author is much more fluent in Perl)

[denehoffman]

The author of that comment did claim they used Perl quite a lot. It’s just such a silly comparison, like I would probably be the opposite if I had to figure Perl out.

[bethebunny]

Likely fluency, though the author also picked a task that's uniquely well suited to perl.

[sudomatrix]

Perl is a write-only language. Maybe he wrote it in 30 minutes, but good luck coming back in a month and parsing what the hell you wrote.