On Thursday 02 October 2008, Nate Straz wrote: > 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 > As coordinator of the local Zope/Python users group you know where I'll come down. I did some perl program many years ago, before I discovered python. I do some PHP programming now because I inherited some systems that use it. Otherwise I do almost everything in Python. I've not tried Ruby because I don't have any burning desire to do so. The only thing I haven't been able to do with python is get the curl module to work with a particular online system. Fortunately it works with the PHP implementation of curl so I use that for the last bit of processing. FWIW Python has been my language of choice for more then ten years and Zope has been my web platform of choice for almost 9. So I have the bias that comes with comfort and familiarity. Jack -- Jack Ungerleider jack at jacku.com http://www.jacku.com