Re: OT - trivial programming language
On Fri, 21 May 2004, richard lyons wrote:
> On Friday 21 May 2004 18:56, Benedict Verheyen wrote:
> > richard lyons wrote:
> > > I'm asking for a bit of advice here.
> [...]
> > > learning one of the lighter languages that I keep seeing mention
> > > of. So the question is, which do you people recommend?
> [...]
> >
> > A lot of languages are suited for this. A really easy language to
> > learn is
> > Python. There is also php, java and so on.
>
> php is really for talking to a webserver, which is unnecessary for the
> kind of things I have in mind. Java... hmmm... I keep seeing mention
> of Ruby, but have no idea what its strengths are. Perl seems
> overqualified - even though I have played with it a bit.
Not sure what "overqualified" means in this context - on a reasonably
modern machine, the speed and memory overhead for loading perl is likely
to be indistinguishable for most tasks from that for loading python, sed,
awk, ruby, or even (gasp) Java.
>
> > But if i where you i would first
> > have a look at Python.
>
> That makes two votes for Python (the other was off-list). I've had it
> in mind to find time to investigate Python -- so I'll have a go at
> that.
>
Python isn't meaningfully smaller or faster. The difference between perl
and python seems to be mostly one of preference and personal history --
the syntaxes are very different, so it can be hard to move between perl
and python. I happened to learn perl and have used it a lot, so would use
perl for this; it's easier than deciding whether, say, awk is optimal for
a given task and then using awk. I suspect others deal similarly with
python. But what the heck - here's a vote for perl.
ap
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists@perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu
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