These are teachers teaching software. They like the study because it somewhat confirm their experience (switching to python makes learning significantly faster).
It is not The Final Proof (against what? perl?), but it is nice to find one way, among maybe other, to give some ground to empirical teaching experience.
I don't know much of perl, but I tried bash, and know PHP well, and really, really, the language used does matter, it will shape your models and logic, and change the way you handle, debug, write, read, maintain code.
Some people seem to adhere to the relativist cliché: all languages are good for something, in their field of usage. It is a matter of personal taste (implying it doesn't matter at all).
I don't agree. All languages are not equal. The breadth or their application field is often not comparable (eg compare bash, which is useful for some unix scripting tasks, with python, which can do web, and math, and stats, and windows grey-hacking, and multiplatform desktop clients, and image processing, and Unix scripting, etc.)
Having worked with (and fought against) PHP for many years and recently switched away, I can tell, it is not a matter of taste, some languages are simply worse, which implies that some are better. There is no "equal rights" to enforce in this domain.
I first learned programming writing BBC BASIC; perl is now my weapon of choice but I'm not sure I would have liked it nearly as much had I learned it first.
Interestingly (perhaps) I repeatedly hear from people with language/humanities background that they tried both python and perl and found perl much, much easier to start to get things done with - the more natural-language-ish aesthetic of perl being a strong contributor to that (I'm a pure maths grad but my parents are both Eng. Lit. grads, so I guess I sort of count in the "humanities background" category).
On the other hand, people with non-humanities backgrounds almost always found python easier to start to get things done with, even if they later found perl to be their preference.
Above comments based purely on anecdata; take them for what you will.
It is not The Final Proof (against what? perl?), but it is nice to find one way, among maybe other, to give some ground to empirical teaching experience.
I don't know much of perl, but I tried bash, and know PHP well, and really, really, the language used does matter, it will shape your models and logic, and change the way you handle, debug, write, read, maintain code.
Some people seem to adhere to the relativist cliché: all languages are good for something, in their field of usage. It is a matter of personal taste (implying it doesn't matter at all).
I don't agree. All languages are not equal. The breadth or their application field is often not comparable (eg compare bash, which is useful for some unix scripting tasks, with python, which can do web, and math, and stats, and windows grey-hacking, and multiplatform desktop clients, and image processing, and Unix scripting, etc.)
Having worked with (and fought against) PHP for many years and recently switched away, I can tell, it is not a matter of taste, some languages are simply worse, which implies that some are better. There is no "equal rights" to enforce in this domain.
[edit: clarify]