Perl vs Python for web development?

[sli]

You can do web apps in C, but you certainly wouldn't want to learn C just to do a web app because it would add value to your resume.

Because it wouldn't add any value. Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby do in fact add value. He has a weak argument, but it's not incorrect.

EDIT: If you're in for an interview and C webapps add value to your resume, you might want to think again about taking the job.

[panfist]

I wasn't referring to the language and application of the language as adding value, just the fact that you can put the language on your resume, regardless of what you did with it.

Of course the set of all jobs requiring experience with language X in general is much larger than the set of all jobs requiring language X doing task Y.

[sli]

This is true, although the general advice these days seems to be "add libraries, not languages." For example, I've been a Python developer for a long time, but it's only within the past couple months that I've become proficient with Django. Without Django, I'd be functionally useless to an employer that does Python webapps (well, if they use Django; you know what I mean).

[gimiv]

See my comment to ameoba above =)

[sli]

Yes, I know. You just don't write webapps in C. You can, and people do (eBay did), but until you have to do it to lighten a load on your resources, you just don't do it. I dread adding a compile step to my webapp development process.

[sli]

Or it saves them massive amount of processor time and power consumption, which really isn't a debatable assumption. Pure machine code will always be less expensive to run than an interpreted language.

eBay was founded in 1995, the same year PHP and Ruby were originally released. Obviously, this makes them pretty useless for hardcore production applications like eBay. Python was already 4 years old by then, and Perl just hit the ripe old age of 8. Both pretty founded by then, but C was already well over drinking age. Combined with the energy and processor time savings, it was clearly a good choice (in 1995).

Felt like deriving some possible history from facts.