OT: Should I learn bash/C/python/perl/other

[Paul Howarth]

On Thu, 2005-08-11 at 13:10 +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 8/11/05, Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org> wrote:
> > You do know that PHP has a command-line mode, and you don't need a
> > browser or server to use it, right?
> > 
> > Paul.
> 
> Yes, I know that. But I am looking for something more flexible,
> something more oriented for file manipulation and similar stuff, not
> for creating just text output, which is the goal of php.
> 
> I 'could' get away with what I am doing now in php, but I intend to
> use linux for a long time, and I want to know how to give it my own
> instructions, not just run a program that someone else wrote to solve
> her specific problem. I find that to be able to really _use_ the
> computer I must know how to speak it's language, to give it commands.
> I went googleing to figure out what language I must speak to the
> computer, and found many. So I thought that I'd ask here, what is a
> prefered language? I want something that I will be able to use on
> other machines as well, which is another reason why I don't want to
> use php, as not many home machines have it installed.
> 
> Furthering my research, it would seem that perl is good for this, as
> it appears to be installed in many more machines than python.

perl is more portable than python - programs written for perl are far
more likely to run on a new version of perl than the equivalent for
python. However, python is probably more readable and writable than perl
for a new user, and is the language most Fedora system utilities (e.g.
yum) are written in. Both perl and python run on Windows too.

>  Or
> should I go with C? lso, as I understand it, if I write in C I can
> compile for both windows and linux. Is that correct?

You have to be very careful about how you write your code to make it
portable to both environments. If you need a GUI, you'll need a
cross-platform GUI toolkit like Qt too.

If it's only one language to learn, and you're a Fedora user, I'd go for
python.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>