On Oct 2 14:45, Mike Miller wrote: > On Thu, 2 Oct 2008, Nate Straz wrote: > >On Oct 2 14:22, Mike Miller wrote: > > > >>I want to spend some time learning a general-purpose interpreted > >>language. > > > >I recommend Python. The interactive shell it provides make it very easy > >to try things out before you put them in a script. > > OK, but how does Python compare with Perl and Ruby? They don't have > interactive shells? Are there other major differences. Python has a very large and active development community, including work on the core language. It has a very rich standard library and several web frameworks to choose from. I haven't done anything with Ruby, so I can't comment on that. I have written some Perl code. Enough that I'm not completely frustrated with the language anymore. There is always some set of magic characters you need to put around a variable name in Perl to get it to do what you want. I think Python is better for the following reasons: 1. The interactive shell makes it trivial to experiment. 2. The standard library is just that, standard. It'll always be there. 3. OOP was built in, not bolted on 4. There's a local Python Users Group (TCZPUG) ;) 5. Python code tends to look cleaner than other code. Nate