On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 12:43 PM, Steve Cayford <strayf at freeshell.org> wrote: > I would second the perl vote. One-liners, system administration, web > applications, it runs the gamut and scales well. Just follow best practices > to keep code clean and manageable. I'll third perl. The synax (mostly) makes sense, and you have the option to precompile or not. I wrote a really weird app for work in Perl (my first REAL coding project) and I really like coding in it. Much more than PHP, which isn't bastardized perl so much as just a bad idea. Serious work (hardware calls, memory mangement) sometimes requires C/C++, though I actually had better luck with perl handling PID forks and stuff that I would expect C++ to do well. My C++ code actually crashed after iteration #2 of vfork(), never figured out why. Now remember, I have no clue what I'm doing. I don't know why my code works, it just happens to. I probably could have made C++ work well but I gave up and went back to perl. Python was all the rage for awhile, and has some really nice characteristics. After writing an app in perl I really didn't feel like changing course and re-writing the whole thing in python because someone told me it was better. Again, YMMV. I really don't know why/if python is awesome. When all else fails, I go back to my DOS 3.2/GW-BASIC floppy set and start hacking the code the way I did when I first learned to program. Brian