[OT] Which scripting language for physicist?

[Eray Ozkural <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>]

A friend of mine needs to write control programs for physics
lab equipment. He'll probably be using serial or parallel ports
for signaling. He doesn't know programming so I advised
him to start off with an interpreted language. Which PL would you
advise for such a task?

Another constraint is portability: it'd better if the program could
run on both linux and windoze.

I told him that python, tcl/tk, or perl would do the job for him,
he chose python because of the high-quality online docs. However,
I'm not that sure. I'd like to hear your opinion.

Thanks,

-- 
Eray (exa) Ozkural
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
e-mail: erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo