Re: Programming first steps.
Andrew M.A. Cater dijo [Sun, Nov 16, 2003 at 11:00:14PM +0000]:
> > (2) Perl or Python. This seems to be another divided camp.
> > What are the capabilities of each? What are the applications of each?
>
> Perl - wherever you used to use a shell script, consider Perl. Perl
> also has concepts from sed and awk. Wherever you have to pattern match
> which means more than a relatively straightforward grep, consider Perl.
>
> Perl is essentially sysadmin glue and text chunking - but a whole lot
> besides. The reason I say consider perl is because there are times
> when a four line shell script will do it well. There's More Than One
> Way To Do It :)
I strongly reccomend Perl. Why? Well, that's how I learnt (or more
properly, how I picked up after years of inactivity) programming (I
had only BASIC experience before that). Perl is a language meant to be
easy to write - Yes, your first code will probably not be very
maintainable until you reach enough skills, but it will let you
concentrate on how to program, how to deal with programming concepts -
Don't care about what goes on behind scenes, there will be plenty of
time in the future to learn about memory management and stuff. I think
a newbie will really appreciate Larry Wall's vision of a
pseudo-natural programming language.
> Python is a "proper programming language" but I know nothing much
> more about it to comment.
I found Python to be a very nice, elegant language. I have not yet
used it for any real project, but I am looking forward to give it a
spin.
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Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@gwolf.cx - (+52-55)5630-9700 ext. 1366
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