Learning by doing

Recently at work, we have been discussing the question of Perl versus Python for file copy, ftp, email and other daily, weekly or monthly automation / integration tasks. We considered Perl because some existing tasks had already been written in it, and Perl has a reputation as the System Admin's language of choice. I took a task that needed automated and wrote it in Perl 5.8, then refined it using CPAN (sweet CPAN) for ArgvFile, Log4Perl, Carp, and Date::Calc. I find Perl to be very functional and completely able to meet my needs, but very quirky or perhaps unsettling. You see, I have been an object oriented programmer for a while now, and Perl's class system just feels "bolted on" to me. And I really had to jump through hoops to do a try/catch, but using eval with a return flag and an END block to test the return worked acceptably. I didn't test the exception module, as I did not discover it in time. Next I tried Python 2.5. After a quick brush-up on the