If you think in terms of as much stuff done in as little characters as possible, there is no competition for PERL.

I think this particular competition though is counting bytes of machine code. I thought I was pretty good myself with reducing a printer driver into 136 bytes, but Chess in 500 that is really something.

Occam's razor says not.

Readability always depends on the programmer. Indentation does not give you readability by itself. You need modularity, comments, compactness, good symbol selection, etc. There is so much more to readability. Maybe you just saw a python written by very good programmers, but I saw python scripts written by mediocre programmers and they are not any more or less readable than any other program in any other language that I run through indent.

A lot of sysadmins, devops and product integration people using perl for quick filters so they don't have to learn awk or sed with:

cmd | perl -e 'stmt;stmt;stmt;stmt;stmt' | cmd

You cannot do the same thing in python easily and that is an issue as you mentioned. Another issue is that the whitespace is creating havoc in bigger team and multi-platform projects where people work with many different environments and editors and small whitespace changes are sometimes not so easy to catch and can have code changing impact.

PERL has the write hundred ways quality, but in enterprise you can agree on standard way to write and then a larger team can be more productive in PERL than Python. PERL is also so much better at language embedding if you need to implement core routines in C.

On the other hand Python excels in the new to scripting, small (5) cohesive team market. They got that pretty much cornered now.

Yes, for C the effect is especially strong. It's not like it would not be easier to use other languages, like Swift or Java, but somehow C is up there all this time. There is a reason.

PERL has a staying power. Other scripting languages come and go in popularity. Ruby for example. But eventually the large base of PERL programmers turns out new generation of PERL programmers by mentoring and language selection from being in position of senior / principal engineers and architects. Python is still surprisingly staying up there, being propped by Google and few other corps., but if not for Google, Python would go the way of Ruby. There is a slight chance that Python will manage to stay long enough to build a large base of libraries and examples, so that it will stay and maybe even replace PERL eventually, who knows. But you gotta understand that every 10 years or so, all the old languages get a push from the above mentioned change of guard in the development positions.

All your counter examples are from before 1998, also known as the "Second Coming of Steve Jobs". It was a different company back then.

... and that is why I go with Apple products. At least I know that Apple goes 100% behind the devices they release and they will be around in 5 years and supported. Otherwise you end up with Zune or Google Glass or some other of the plethora of wanna be products from wanna be device companies.

95% of cases are handled like this. Prosecutor will charge everything under the moon to scare the victim into accepting a plea. It does not matter, what is the size of the sentence, your life is ruined forever. So they don't care how much they actually give you first time, just that you do some jail time and have a record. That's the goal. Tough on crime, so many evil people behind bars. Need to start the governor campaign early on.

Look, the constitution guarantees you right to petition government for redress of grievances. There is no guarantee for the government to address those grievances. They made a website, you can petition them, so the constitution is served. Move on citizen. If you like your congress representative, you can keep your congress representative. If you don't like your congress representative, tough luck, you are stuck with him anyway. Demagogracy 101.

There is no need to invent words like Cronycapitalism. It is called Oligarchy.

This guy is not Russian. First of all, he is using the propaganda points that US is spreading in Russia, the fear that China will take part of their territory. It is one of the talking points. Second, he is making homophone mistakes (doubt -> dough) that only native speakers make or sometimes people who use english for 10-20 years or so and he is not making any of the grammar and preposition mistakes common for foreign speakers. It is sad to see our discussion here on slashdot tainted by spooks.

If we only provide value through synergies resulting from M&A activity, we will eventually end up with one large company spanning the entire state and will have the perfect example of communism :)

It's a third comment picking on the missing word "compiler" in my comment... "C compiler won't optimize"... geese. That seemed like a pretty clear thing... no comment edits on slashdot though :(