> “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages cle... | Hacker News

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		BeetleB 40 days ago \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Ask HN: Why Did Python Win? > “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages clear that bar whether they are successful or not. Dial the clock back to 2002, and this statement is not true. Perl became popular not because of its beauty, but because of it being extremely effective glue. It was a language to get stuff done while writing little code. The only mainstream alternative was Python.

dpark 39 days ago [–]

I see. There are two separate but related questions.

1. Why did Python replace Perl?

2. Why did Python become so extremely popular?

The answer to the first is because it’s better than Perl for so many engineers in so many cases. The answer to the second is much broader.

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