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. -- Gunnar Wolf - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - (+52-55)5630-9700 ext. 1366 PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23 Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF