[Info-vax] Python for x86?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/14/2023 11:48 AM, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> 
> On 4/14/23 7:19 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2023-04-13, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>>
>>> I remember back when Perl, Python and Tcl was 3 equivalent choices
>>> for scripting.
>>>
>>> They evolved very different - Perl stayed where it was, Python became
>>> a widely used language and Tcl is practically dead.
>>>
>>> Why did Python become such a success while the other did not?
>>>
>>> My guess:
>>> - Python managed to get into education - not just CS like
>>>     Perl but much broader
> 
> The P in Perl stands for "Practical." Larry Wall is a linguist, not a
> computer scientist, and computer scientists can rarely be accused of
> being practical :-).  There have been books on such things as functional
> programming in Perl but I don't think it was ever big with computer
> scientists.

Maybe not big with Knuth style CS.

But it is my impression that practically all Perl users are
IT professionals. A lot of them with a CS degree even though
they may be more practical than academic.

And I would also call Larry Wall for a programmer even though
he did not study CS.

>>> - Python web approaches with Django etc. turned more future oriented
>>>     than Perl CGI
> 
> The use of a web framework like Django has nothing to do with the
> presence or absence of CGI.  You can in fact run Django using CGI and
> people used to do that.  But for some time now you wouldn't because WSGI
> is better. It's no different in the Perl world.  While you can run Perl
> scripts via CGI, today you'd be more like to use PSGI.

I am not an expert in Django but a bit of googling indicate
that Django has never supported CGI and that they
deprecated/removed FastCGI support in 2014/2015. When Django
was invented 2005-2008 then CGI was already an obsolete technology.
All Django tutorials I can find do not use CGI or FastCGI.

I am sure there are other options than CGI for Perl (even I have
heard about mod_perl). And I am also sure that modern web
frameworks similar to Django has been created for Perl (Google
find Mojolicious).

But if you look at the web landscape today then Django and Flask
(on Python and not using CGI) are widely used and Perl is niche - and
a good chunk of that niche is 20+ years old CGI scripts.

Could Mojolicious and Perl had become widely used with Django and
Python as niche? Probably, but it did not happen.

Arne