On Thu, 2008-10-02 at 14:22 -0500, Mike Miller wrote: > What is the best choice? Excellent question, Mike! Are you going to need to maintain or integrate with existing code, or should we assume you're taking the "tabula rasa" approach with the code you'll be writing? If it's the former, I'd suggest Perl. I'd bet there's more Perl out there than Ruby. That dang CPAN has everything and the kitchen sink. And the bathroom sink too. I don't have experience with Ruby, but former Perl-loving colleagues of mine started a Ruby-only shop. They now have many thousands of lines of code and still absolutely love Ruby. I generally dismiss any arguments about very high-level languages getting unwieldy after X number of lines because I'm convinced you can write sloppy, unwieldy code in any language. :) I've used Perl for years, but my current favorite is Python. This is mainly because Perl has too much syntax--I can barely read my own code from years ago! Python, on the other hand, reads like pseudocode. I actually love that it forces programmers to use consistent indenting. If you happen to know of a particular feature you want to be built-in or easily accessible (do you want one leading option for Web development? do you like monkey-patching and duck-typing? do you use regular expressions often? do you want to type as few characters as possible?) a particular language might emerge as the best choice for you. But all programming languages are Turing-complete, right? All the ones we've discussed are mostly procedural. Most run on almost any platform. All have their warts. All will doubtlessly be more rapid to develop than C/C++, Java, etc. Any way, you win! Here's a thought: learn a more functional language like Smalltalk or Haskell! Both have seen recent surges of interest. Smalltalk with Seaside/Squeak, Haskell with uh... Pugs, I guess. Anyway, I'm thinking it might be good to create some new and unique synapses/neurons/whatever by forcing yourself to think differently. Please let us (or at least me) know which language you pick and how the journey progresses. Start a blog, perhaps? This is fun stuff. -- Adam Monsen -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20081003/c1260b72/attachment.pgp