I just finished a programming task that Andy assigned to me yesterday. He emphasized during the call it was an easy one, but I spent 8-ish hours - this is a good number indicating how hard I worked or maybe how poor my Perl is.
Some thoughts over Python versus Perl, and my gloomy future
I used Python in my AI and NLP classes, and Machine Translation project . Python has simple syntax with well-defined structure, but its tradeoff is that the simple syntax cannot provide good clarification for data types. It perfectly works for lazy and forgetful programmers like me.
Compared with Python, Perl is better for Unix scripting. I gave up Python after I searched how to run shell in python script for one hour. Each type in Perl has very specific clarification. It looks more professional (maybe to a dummy like me). That reminded of my former's suggestion for data dumping by Perl but not by Python. More than that, interviewers like Perl so bad!
I have to be honest, I had not touched Unix or Linux before I did a switch on my major to computer science. I just realized there are so many treasures that I can start to probe. The treasures are more about skills, not research. I am really tired of research and whatever is called research. Also, Industry does not care what innovative ideas you have implemented in your research. They begin with "hmm, interesting" and then ask what languages and known algorithms you used in the research. Now I really don't know which one I like more, but I know neither of them likes me.
Some useful references for transparent programming with Perl and Shell (Americans feel better if you use them as so-called "references"!)
