I spent some time with Python and thought I'd share some opinions.

In short, my conclusion is that Python is a great programming language and I'll definitely invest some time into it: it has a clean syntax, it's very fast (2x compared to Perl), it has lexical scope (which is the only kind I care about, but see below), true objects, first class functions.  It has its share of downsides and I hope I'm expressing them well here.

I welcome any Perl and Python experts to state their opinion on the matter, and maybe fix/optimize my code if this is possible.

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Until a few days ago, I had a TV cable-based network connection.  I had a fixed IP so it was easy to configure firewall in various machines that I can access to allow access only from my home IP.  And I was happy.

My ISP has recently moved me to a more robust, Ethernet connection, which is done via PPPoE.  All great, but the IP is changing every time I connect.  That wouldn't be a problem if I never had any downtimes, but in practice this is not possible.  Every once in a while, my router will reconnect and will get me a brand new IP and machines where I configured a firewall won't let me in.

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