> I refuse to give in to this evil ploy. I will NOT install it. I will NOT go through the tutorial. I will NOT start learning yet another language.
>
> Nope. I'm going to go work on some perl scripts.

Learning to program and learning new programming languages aren't even close to the same thing. Initially, the former comes with learning the latter, so they get confused.

I learned Python in an afternoon. I'm not bragging -- that's simply all it takes for somebody who has already learned the more hefty lessons of learning how to engineer software at all. The hard part of programming is learning how to think logically, arrange and encapsulate units of functionality, and keeping in mind issues of extensibility and maintainability. Those issues transcend language boundaries.

What I'm saying is, if you stuck it to perl and started playing with python, you wouldn't be throwing away everything you've learned so far and starting over -- you'd just be continuing to learn computer programming and adding another language to your repertoire of ways to employ those skills.

Changing the subject, as a language, Python impresses me. Perl is insidiously obfuscated and non-intuitive. What I love about Perl is the amazing freedom you have in it. What I hate about Perl is the amazing freedom you have in it. (The kind of freedom Perl gives you tends to be the freedom to write bad code -- which is fine for quickie scripts but not good at all for larger applications. Like, say, RinkChat, grumblegrumble.) That and the fact that unless you're careful, whatever you write will be completely unreadable.

Python is a little more ordered, intuitive, and a LOT simpler with regard to syntax. It would probably force you to adopt good programming practices better than perl does (which is not at all), although not so well as, say, Java does. The more I read about it, the more I like it.