I’ve sometimes been asked “why use language X when you already have language Y”, and I’m bad at answering these things on the spot because I don’t generally think about it in a “pros/cons” sense. The differences are sometimes subtle and numerous, not few and obvious.
In any case, it seems someone has already crowd-sourced this problem for *everything*, not just programming. In googling about Mathematica vs. other languages, I came across HammerPrinciple.com, where things are compared side by side in multiple dimensions. I’m almost incredulous over the amount of data.
C++
Based on 108674 responses from 8978 people, this is the picture we’ve built up of C++.
Ranked high for
- This language is large
- I use many applications written in this language
- This language makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot
- …
Ranked low for
- This language is good for beginners
- This language is minimal
- This language would be good for teaching children to write software
- …
Most similar to
- C
- Java
- Fortran
- …
Most dissimilar from
- Lua
- Smalltalk
- Scheme
- …
Perl — Python
THIS LANGUAGE MAKES IT EASY TO SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE FOOT
89% — 11%
187 out of 209 picked Perl over Python
THIS LANGUAGE EXCELS AT TEXT PROCESSING
77% — 23%
237 out of 306 picked Perl over Python
THIS LANGUAGE HAS A NICHE OUTSIDE OF WHICH I WOULD NOT USE IT
76% — 24%
206 out of 268 picked Perl over Python
I FIND THIS LANGUAGE EASY TO PROTOTYPE IN
27% — 73%
220 out of 302 picked Python over Perl
IT IS EASY TO DEBUG PROGRAMS WRITTEN IN THIS LANGUAGE WHEN IT GOES WRONG
26% — 74%
196 out of 268 picked Python over Perl