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The Year in Scripting Languages

Posted by michael on from the fun-for-the-whole-family dept.

Mitchell writes "People from several language communities came together to create a joint year-in-review for Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl."

238 comments

  1. What about... by dildatron · · Score: 4, Funny

    I can't believe all the biased articles on this place! I can't believe the would cover Perl, tcl, etc, and leave out the Windows Batch file scripting language! This is dispicable! It's so powerful, no wonder it's #1.

    --


    If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
    1. Re:What about... by dirvish · · Score: 2, Interesting

      and PHP?

      --
      FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
    2. Re:What about... by Malc · · Score: 2

      That's because MSFT have replaced it with the more functional Windows Scripting Host. Haven't you been paying attention to all the WSH security issues?

    3. Re:What about... by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The "what about PHP" question is a serious one, I think. The release of a stable command-line version of PHP (which I think happened in 2002, IIRC) is major news in the scripting-language world.

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    4. Re:What about... by Greedo · · Score: 2

      Derick Rethans' PHP Look Back 2002

      --
      Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
    5. Re:What about... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      PostScript is the king.

    6. Re:What about... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I just want to make the comment that you should check out TCL. It is the most underrated, unappreciated scripting language of all time. Check it out...

      http://www.tcl.tk/

      Why so cool? The code logic is perfect, you can learn it in 5 minutes and you can create your own language including control commands (ie, your own for/next, while, if/then, etc)

    7. Re:What about... by rabidcow · · Score: 1

      It's actually pretty decent once you add UnxUtils. Just make sure it's windows batch and not dos batch.

    8. Re:What about... by SecretAsianMan · · Score: 3, Interesting
      I can't believe the would cover Perl, tcl, etc, and leave out the Windows Batch file scripting language! This is dispicable! It's so powerful, no wonder it's #1.

      DOS scripting is no longer Microsoft's preferred scripting feature.

      Windows batch files are a holdover from DOS. DOS as we know it originally ran on IBM PCs and early descendants, which were cheap, slow, 16-bit, underfeatured toy computers. At that same time, Unix was running on expensive, fast, 32-bit, featurful computers. Before that, Unix did run on 16-bit computers (various submodels of PDP-11), but PDP-11s were certainly more expensive and more featureful than 8086- and 80286-based PCs, and PDPs were most definitely not toys.

      The point? Unix scripting was better than DOS scripting. Windows evolved from DOS, and as a result it got DOS's scripting capabilities. That evolution is only now reaching the stage where it can be said with any regularity that Windows is evolving from itself rather than from DOS. Win2K and (maybe) WinNT4 were the first incarnations of Windows with this property. It is a very slow process.

      What we see now is Windows evolving its own scripting engines. I'm not savvy about some of these things, but I do know that there are VBScript or Windows Scripting Host for automating things in the OS, and VBA for scripting inside individual apps like Excel or Access. Granted, these are all based on VB, which is lacking when compared to Java or C++, but these are quite well-suited for scripting in a Windows environment.

      Just yesterday, for example, I wrote a simple Windows script that renames files in a directory tree by doing regular expression search and replace. This clearly represents an improvement over the legacy DOS scripting capabilities.

      --

      Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.

  2. IN SOVIET RUSSIA... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The scripts review YOU!

    1. Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny
      The scripts review YOU!

      Nice try, but as I understand the form, you need to avoid the article "the" or Smirnoff will never option your screenplay. For example:

      In Soviet Russia, article omits you!

      Moderators: I am not trying to encourage the form, other than trying to bring it to a bearable levels of authenticity.

  3. Next year... Invite PHP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It does have a large market share, ya know.

    1. Re:Next year... Invite PHP by Valiss · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah but then you'd have to invite ASP, and really, who would want to do that? =]

      --

      -Valiss
    2. Re:Next year... Invite PHP by Captain+Large+Face · · Score: 2

      Why would you have to invite ASP? Just because you're asking Cinderella to the ball, doesn't mean you have to ask her ugly sisters as well.

    3. Re:Next year... Invite PHP by RevAaron · · Score: 2

      PHP is the ugly sister. ASP is more like the house all those ugly sisters live in- you can have any particular sister do the work for you. (that is, you can write ASP in more than one language) Hell, with ASP.NET, at least you can use the ASP.NET/.NET API with real languages, without being restricted to the likes of JavaScript, VBScript, or PHP. Blech. You could even use COBOL with ASP.NET! WOOT! OR FORTRAN!

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
    4. Re:Next year... Invite PHP by gregmac · · Score: 1
      PHP is moving towards being a full-featured scripting language. Although it has been able to work with shell scripts for a while now, the latest version adds specific features for "command line" mode, well suited to shell scripts.

      I have been writing shell scripts in PHP for quite a while now, and it's very handy. Fast to code, powerful, and very reliable. Not to mention cross-platform, if you need it.

      --
      Speak before you think
  4. Re:Errors of omission by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Oops, borked link. If /. editors can do it, so can I.

  5. One important addition to perl by TokyoBoy · · Score: 3, Interesting
    A release of a new PerlQT was made. http://perlqt.sourceforge.net/
    From the website: "PerlQt-3 is Ashley Winters' full featured object oriented interface to Trolltech's C++ Qt toolkit v3.0. It is based on the SMOKE library, a language independent low-level wrapper generated from Qt headers by Richard Dale's kalyptus thanks to David Faure's module".

    Another thing that's nice is that "All Qt classes are accessed through the prefix Qt::, which replaces the initial Q of Qt classes. When browsing the Qt documentation, you simply need to change the name of classes so that QFoo reads Qt::Foo". So, essentialy the API is similar to QT with reduces the learning curve quite a bit.

    --
    Mecworks BLOG
  6. Missing by The+Bungi · · Score: 4, Interesting
    No mention of ActiveState's plugins for Perl and Python to Visual Studio.NET?

    Not really ports to the platform itself, but great productivity boosters regardless. I've used VisualPython with VS.NET 1.0 and it rocks.

  7. Uhh... by IcEMaN252 · · Score: 1

    (/me hopes parent is modded +1 Funny)

    Does anyone else recall the notes attached to polls about not complaining about poll options?

    Anyways, what does Batch do that Shell Scripting (also not included) doesn't again?

    --
    CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
    1. Re:Uhh... by inode_buddha · · Score: 2

      Why do I still prefer bash? Bummer, you'll have to go RTFM yourself....

      --
      C|N>K
    2. Re:Uhh... by Randolpho · · Score: 2

      It's available for DOS! 'nuff said. :D

      --
      "Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
      -Marilyn Manson
  8. awwww :( by Rcknight · · Score: 1

    i was expecting some kind of calender script :)

    1. Re:awwww :( by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      #!/usr/bin/env python
      import calendar
      calendar.prcal(2002)

  9. Missing information..... by Kenja · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    No mention of Sun using legal means to force Java on the end user. I for one find this to be the most important scripting language news of the year. Or did that happen in 2003? I thought it was late 2002 but I could be worng.

    --

    "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
    1. Re:Missing information..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Java is a real language (mediocre, but far beyond these others). You may be referring to JSP, but Microsoft hasn't been ordered to distribute any servlet host.

    2. Re:Missing information..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bullshit. What's a real language putz?

    3. Re:Missing information..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      • If the type system and method declarations are so freeform that most blatantly malformed programs can't even be detected (short of path coverage in test cases)
      • if the runtime is so dynamic that an efficient implementation is impossible
      • if there was a version within the last decade that didn't even support objects
      • if errors are ignored without relying on people to put diligently put explicit checks absolutely everywhere
      • if it's said to be designed for ___ (Web services/text processing/math/"glue") and thus poorly generalized
      • if most users are novices, rather than having migrated from some other language
      • if you have to switch to something else every time you want to write a real program (like a raytracer, or a database, or a codec)

      ... you aren't using a real language.

  10. Where is my... by 216pi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... PHP?

    This report shows how it is growing.

    1. Re:Where is my... by JanusFury · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Unlike Ruby, Python, Lua, Perl, and Tcl, PHP doesn't have any real uses other than websites, and it could be disputed that it doesn't even do websites all that well ;) PHP isn't really a scripting language in the same sense that those others are. ASP/ASP.net and Java Server Pages aren't on there either, you might notice.

      --
      using namespace slashdot;
      troll::post();
    2. Re:Where is my... by 216pi · · Score: 2

      you are so right... I missed this point...

      But as far I can see, they are trying hard to make it usable as scripting language.

    3. Re:Where is my... by JanusFury · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Interesting. Sounds a lot like the equivalent of trying to change HTML into a programming language, though... it's just not designed for it. Almost everything about PHP is designed for webpages.

      --
      using namespace slashdot;
      troll::post();
    4. Re:Where is my... by Dave2+Wickham · · Score: 2

      Yeah... I think they should stop trying to make themselves a scripting language for everything. They should concentrate on the web, not ncurses or Qt... PHP wasn't designed for it. Think of the UNIX philosophy - one tool for each job.
      I was going to comment on this too, then saw you already had ;).

    5. Re:Where is my... by mrcparker · · Score: 1

      I have to disagree with you. I have been doing my scripting on PHP for about a year now and - at least for me - it kicks the shit out of perl for about 95% of all scripts. Not only is the syntax clean, it is really easy to extend - unlike Perl, the PHP C code is clean and modular.

      Then again, the bulk of my development is in C and C++, so PHP is much more intuitive for me than most other scripting languages.

    6. Re:Where is my... by $$$$$exyGal · · Score: 2

      This makes your point the best: porn

      --
      Very popular slashdot journal for adul
    7. Re:Where is my... by mrcparker · · Score: 1

      I don't see anything wrong with extending a language as long as it stays modular and the modules are not required for the basic functionality. The PHP developers have done a good job with this in the 4.x releases, keeping the core language pretty small.

    8. Re:Where is my... by shiflett · · Score: 2, Informative

      I think you should use PHP before really forming any opinions. HTML is a markup language, whereas things like PHP and Perl are scripting languages. There is nothing really similar in the least. Perl can output HTML just like PHP can.

      I prefer PHP as a scripting language for many tasks, including anything involving database access. People have written complex socket applications in PHP such as HTTP servers and HTTP proxies, simple sysadmin utilities, and everything in between. In fact, many C programmers seem to prefer PHP as a scripting language due to its C-like syntax and clean design.

      PHP and Perl are equivalent in my mind in terms of what can be accomplished. If you are comfortable with the syntax of one, there is no pressing need to learn the other. If you need a shell script, PHP and Perl both work. If you are developing for the Web, PHP and mod_perl do the job. PHP is not limited to Apache, however, which is one of the many reasons it has been more widely adopted in the Web development community.

      I have found that those who think PHP is only useful for Web application development are the same people who think Perl is only useful for shell scripting. See if the mod_perl community agrees with that. :-)

    9. Re:Where is my... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think there is some confusion as to what is and isn't a scripting language. For example, all of the following are called scripting languages: lingo, actionscript, perfectscript, javascript, openscript, hyperscript, etc. The main difference between scripting languages and programming languages is that scripting languages are not compiled (they are interpreted). By this definition, PHP would be a scripting language. What other types of languages are there besides scripting and programming?

    10. Re:Where is my... by shiflett · · Score: 2, Informative

      > PHP isn't really a scripting language in the same
      > sense that those others are.

      Actually, it is.

      #! /usr/local/bin/php

    11. Re:Where is my... by JanusFury · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Actually, I've used PHP extensively and my personal site (fury.rpgsource.net) is built in it. I've also used ASP, and I personally consider PHP to be a steaming heap of shit.

      '... due to its C-like syntax and clean design.'
      PHP only slightly resembles C (it goes off from C syntax in wild tangents all over the place), and it's not exactly what I'd call cleanly designed. For example, here's a few string functions:
      str_replace
      strlen
      sprintf
      split
      N ow, in real programming languages, similar commands generally have similar names.
      Let's not get into how individual PHP commands have different orders for their parameters even when they do the same thing... (for example, split() takes delimiter first, string second, while strrchr() takes string first, delimiter second. Don't even get me started on how useless PHP's string functions are in general - they all return strings instead of indexes!

      --
      using namespace slashdot;
      troll::post();
    12. Re:Where is my... by Jack9 · · Score: 1

      String functions that are irregularly named...that's exactly how C started. I dont think anyone claims PHP is a finished language because of obvious irregularities like that. A more accurate statement would be, "in refined and full-featured languages, similar commands have similar names". PHP is specifically loose with it's syntax for ease (the reverse is that every page of code looks different from programmer to programmer). So what. Anyone make code ugly, why try in vain to stop it when your aim is ease of use? I would like to know the real reason you think PHP is a steaming pile.

      --

      Often wrong but never in doubt.
      I am Jack9.
      Everyone knows me.
    13. Re:Where is my... by shiflett · · Score: 5, Informative

      As a C programmer myself, I think it is pretty evident that you are not. That's not meant to be offensive, but you should not attempt to speak from inexperience as a general rule. Try to be more open minded, or at least only form an opinion after you have educated yourself on a particular topic.

      For example, after your attempt to say that PHP only slightly resembles C, you try to point out weaknesses in PHP by mentioning functions that are direct equivalents of C functions (strlen, strchr, sprintf, etc.). Make up your mind. :-)

      Also, since it seems you suggest otherwise, there is a good reason why not every string manipulating function begins with str_. Do you think C should have used str_printf() and str_sprintf()? How about PHP's functions crypt(), echo(), explode(), md5(), trim(), soundex(), etc. Should these all be renamed? Bill Gates may agree with you, but I doubt you will find many open source developers who do.

      In case it is helpful, strchr() and split() do not do the same thing. It sounds like you're heading for trouble there. :-)

      I guess my point is that your inexperience is not a valid complaint against PHP. Yes, it is not the perfect language, but it happens to work well for a lot of people. If you want to bash it, at least use valid reasons (which there are plenty) such as how mod_php is a content generation module and therefore unable to interact with other request phases within Apache (though I think this is being remedied in the apache_hooks API). Or, point to a benchmark showing how Perl parses large text files 20% faster in some cases. Or, show how Python's OO model is more advanced.

      Sorry if this post comes off a bit strong, but I tire of seeing hollow rhetoric.

    14. Re:Where is my... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Show me your C child. The major and only valid compliant the OP boasted on was returns. Should php functions return indexes and not strings? Most scripting languages do for char array manipulations don't ya know.

    15. Re:Where is my... by togofspookware · · Score: 1

      Beh. Well I agree with you.
      What I don't like is the lack of
      pass-by-reference. After working with
      Java, Python, and Ruby (yum, yum),
      I find a lot of PHP's 'features' a little bit annoying.

      --
      Duct tape, XML, democracy: Not doing the job? Use more.
    16. Re:Where is my... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, I've used PHP extensively and my personal site (fury.rpgsource.net) is built in it. I've also used ASP, and I personally consider PHP to be a steaming heap of shit.

      WTF? Who the hell modded this up?

    17. Re:Where is my... by Captain+Large+Face · · Score: 2

      Ahem?

    18. Re:Where is my... by RevAaron · · Score: 2

      Well, it can't really be much easier than using Inline C in Perl...

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
    19. Re:Where is my... by RevAaron · · Score: 2

      Well, it can't really be much easier than using Inline C in Perl... :)

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
    20. Re:Where is my... by Randolpho · · Score: 2

      PHP kicks Perl syntax around a bit, but Python knocks PHP down for the count.

      --
      "Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
      -Marilyn Manson
    21. Re:Where is my... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This week's E-Week show "Scripting languages on the rise"... "Almost one-fourth of all Web servers now support server-side scripting." They say in the article that there was a 52 per cent increase in web servers hostin ga dynamic server side scripting language. M$'s Active Server Pages and PHP are the top two choices. They also said that Java Server Pages (JSP) was much smaller in comparison but had a higher percentage growth.

      Php is a great language for server side scripting. Some day they might have a real compiler or interpreter that doesn't require a web server to be running.

      John D.

    22. Re:Where is my... by gregmac · · Score: 1
      Try PHP CLI.

      It's been able to work like this for a long time (using the cgi version, "#!/usr/bin/php -q"), but as of 4.3.0 they're officially supporting command-line mode as an option.

      --
      Speak before you think
    23. Re:Where is my... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lack of pass by reference? Umn, that's blatently wrong. Do some research on the use of the & character.

    24. Re:Where is my... by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Unlike Ruby, Python, Lua, Perl, and Tcl, PHP doesn't have any real uses other than websites, and it could be disputed that it doesn't even do websites all that well ;)

      Some people *do* use it for things other than websites.

      Anyhow, let's not get into a my-lang-is-better-than-your-lang fight. The benefits and usefulness are a very subjective thing. There is no agreed-upon objective test for comparing the merit. (Amount of code might be a candidate, but it is contentious to agree on a measuring details. Count letters or tokens, how much to penalize symbols, etc.)

      So live and let live. Otherwise we will condem you to program in Java forever and ever.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    25. Re:Where is my... by duncangough · · Score: 0

      #!/usr/bin/php where have you been?

      --
      Suttree, a weblog about casual games development
  11. I try to only use a few scripting languages by MarkWatson · · Score: 5, Informative
    As much as I am able, I try to limit my use of scripting languages to just Python and PHP.

    The reason is simple: I need to use several non-scripting languages (Java, Smalltalk, etc.) and remembering the language syntax and class libraries for more than 4 or 5 programming languages is a hassle.

    BTW, scripting languages are not necessarily horribly inefficient anymore.

    A little off topic, but I compared the resources used for a small web app on the following platforms:

    • Java servlets/JSPs - minimum memory footprint is about 75 megabytes
    • Smalltalk servlets - mimimum memory footprint is about 20 megabytes
    • Python Zope - minimum memory foortprint is about 11 megabytes
    In all three cases, the server processes use negligible CPU time after startup (mostly waiting with select).

    Anyway, for lots of applications, Python is fast enough - no need for high performance compilers like Common Lisp, C++, Smalltalk, etc.

    -Mark

    1. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by DeadSea · · Score: 2

      Memory footprint for a small application is going to be high under Java. Each instance (read each new thread, of which the server creates several) has an entire virtual machine running with a copy of the needed libraries. As your application grows, this overhead gets less significant.

    2. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by axxackall · · Score: 3, Interesting
      My results:
      • Java servlets/JSP (Tomcat) - 8 MB
      • Python Zope - 5 MB
      --

      Less is more !
    3. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by pnatural · · Score: 5, Informative

      These are exiting times for Python programmers.

      Just a few days ago, the "Minimalist Python" project was announced. Its goal is to two fold: reduce the distribution to a central core and to re-write as much of it as possible in Python. By doing so, and by including Psyco the Python specializing compiler , the folks working on the Minimalist distribution hope to have a Python that outperforms C (initial tests show that Python+Psyco does outperform C code in many cases). I've used Psyco a bit, and it is a marvel. The idea of a Python compiler, written in Python, becomes possible, and has recently been discussed quite actively on comp.lang.python.

      Even with the speed improvements, the Real Benefit(tm) of Python is in not saving machine time, it's in saving my time as a developer, because I'm far, far more expensive to employ than a server.

    4. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by Chundra · · Score: 2

      Anyway, for lots of applications, Python is fast enough

      And for those it's not, it's easy enough to write your own extensions in C/C++.

      Also, seeing how you mentioned zope, ZODB and ZEO (the coolest parts of zope, IMHO) are available standalone. BTW, if you're looking for low resource consumption, powerful, python web goodness, give Quixote a look.

    5. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by aled · · Score: 1

      That is in Linux, isn't it? In Windows a thread is a thread AFAIK.

      --

      "I think this line is mostly filler"
    6. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by aled · · Score: 1

      Redhat 8.0 administration tools are in python. Each take at least 11Mb. I'm watching redhat-config-time right now, it just eh... let's you change the time.

      --

      "I think this line is mostly filler"
    7. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by cpeterso · · Score: 2


      Do you have a link with more info about "Minimalist Python"? Google does not show anything related to such a project.

      --
      cpeterso
    8. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by pnatural · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The announcement was only made 4 days ago. It's available on comp.lang.python.announce: link here

      There isn't much yet beyond a mailing list (here) and a lot of discussion on c.l.p, but the folks involved are notable Python contributors. I have no doubt the project will be successful.

    9. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      java spanks meaty pancakes, it's busted,busted,busted,boinkin broken.
      python is ugly and it's OO is painful.
      php is for pansies.

      Thanks for letting us know that you suck.

    10. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by platypus · · Score: 2

      You know what, I wish some guys from the python community would work on get rid of the GIL (global interpreter lock). I develop in zope myself and am a _huge_ fan, but I see clouds on the horizon.

      I fear that products like zope will suffer in the long run, because python server apps just don't scale as well as java apps. Hacks like binding the server process to one cpu and instead spawn multiple processes (each bound to their own cpu) are not the be all and end all of server programming, thei are - well - hacks. And without that binding, the interpreter process will bounce around between cpus and thrash the cache.

      Yes, it's not much of a real concern today, and won't be for the majority of users for a long time, but saying the GIL doesn't matter at all is self-delusion - and that assessement is heard everytime someone asks about the GIL.

    11. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny
      These are exiting times for Python programmers.

      Exiting to Ruby?

    12. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Threads share memory; that's the difference between creating a thread and creating a process (Linux threads look like processes due to the way they evolved, but they still share memory). Giving each thread its own distinct copy of the JVM (JIT compiler and heap) would be astonishingly stupid (besides making inter-thread operations a serious PITA), and I've never heard of any JVM that works that way. If your servlet host is launching a separate JVM for every worker thread, try a less brain-damaged implementation.

    13. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by pnatural · · Score: 2

      I understand your frustration, as I too have hit the limitations imposed by the GIL. I don't think it's as bleak as you make it sound; most Python programmers don't even know it exists.

      In the short term, there are plenty of ways around it -- the easiest being to move some code to a separate instance of Python and then use an RPC mechanism for communication. It's simple and effective.

      In the long run, I can't imagine that the GIL will be in Python 3.0. That's a ways away yet, of course, but I'd be very surprised to see it make it that far.

    14. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by MSBob · · Score: 2

      Have you tried to fire some traffic at your applications through a tool like OpenSTA, for example? It would really tell you what the true performance characteristics are like for your software. Just observing the idle state memory footprints isn't going to tell you much.

      --
      Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
    15. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by RevAaron · · Score: 2

      MarkWatson wrote:
      Smalltalk servlets - mimimum memory footprint is about 20 megabytes

      Ouch! What system are you using for that? Sure, that's a lot better than Java, but 20 MB of a footprint is a lot more than it has to be for Smalltalk.

      I am not running a huge setup, but the small group of servlets I have running on my own machine for my personal access has a running RAM footprint of about 3-5 MB, serving regular static web data, webmail-esque access to my email collection (via a custom module I wrote), a web-based Smalltalk class browser and workspace (for doing scripting and such under some circumstances), some XML-RPC methods (again for my personal use) and a Wiki all under ComSwiki and Comanche running in Squeak Smalltalk.

      Granted, I also have a Smalltalk image for this that has been stripped down to only what is needed for the servlet/web setup. One could the default Squeak image, load in Comanche and get a 20 MB footprint- but then again, you'd have the source and binary loaded into RAM for a ton of stuff that isn't related to serving dynamic and static data. A web browser, a complete IDE, debuggers, inspectors, irc clients, email reader, GUI designer among oodles and oodles of other stuff.

      But I'm guessing you're not using an-worked Squeak image for doing servlets- you're probably using VisualWorks and VisualWave. :)

      I personally use Smalltalk because you can get realworld performance that is adequate (usually faster than Python, but Python is fast enough for me too) and development time that is really outstanding.

      That said, Smalltalk isn't right for everyone, and I'm not trying to convince you to quit using VisualWorks or VisualAge (or whatever Smalltalk dialect you're using) and switch to Squeak, I just am a Smalltalk user with experience in some web apps.

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
    16. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by RevAaron · · Score: 2

      What do you see as being better about Ruby?

      I know about how it's full of more "real" OO than Python, but what else that is practical?

      DISCLAIMER: I'm a Smalltalk programmer, and also use Perl when it's applicable. Ruby, which is referred to as (Smalltalk + Perl) / 2 in a number of places, doesn't really rub me right. Python isn't really what I want to use usually either, but it just seems a bit more... cohesive to me in the work I've done. To each her own.

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
    17. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by RevAaron · · Score: 2

      Am I the only one who is amused by the fact that Zope looks a lot like an attempt to make Python into a new version of Smalltalk? Except this new monster is more bloated, not as consistent or simple, and no where near as mature as a regular Smalltalk setup.

      There was a time when Python was used because it was different than the other options- different than perl and Smalltalk. But so many people are just kind of hacking onto Python all the great features of Smalltalk that have been polished and matured over the last 30 years... Object databases, persistency, an actually object-based system, cutting edge virtual machine/bytecode/cross-platform technology among other things. I guess Python's syntax resembles C/C++/Java quite a bit more than Smalltalk does, and that backwards comabilitibility of mind does make a big difference to a lot of people. :)

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
    18. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by Ian+Bicking · · Score: 2
      I don't really see the similarity to Smalltalk, either in Zope or Python. I mean, obviously they are influenced by Smalltalk, since every OO language after Smalltalk was influenced. But I don't think the similarity is distinctive.

      If you're just thinking Zope is like Smalltalk because of ZODB, you're fishing -- persistence (in this case not entirely orthogonal) is not some Smalltalk invention. Using a VM and bytecodes is entirely conventional these days. And Python's cross-platform philosophy is different from Smalltalk's -- Smalltalk tends to create an insulated environment where the platform doesn't matter. Python tends to live much more closely to the platform than Smalltalk implementations.

      And Zope might be a semantically confused pile of crap, but I wouldn't give Smalltalk credit or blame for that. Smalltalk doesn't have anything like Zope's Acquisition. No decent programming language does -- it's just another name for dynamic scoping.

      I also wouldn't emphasize Python's syntactic similarity to C/C++/Java. It's really not there. They share a function syntax, the infix operators, and the use of "." for member access. That's about it. Python uses newlines for statement terminators, "=" is not an operator, uses ":" to start code blocks and indentation to signify scope, does not require parenthesis around conditionals, and has a completely different "for" statement. Sure, it's syntax is based in Algol, unlike Smalltalk (which I might guess is a weird spinoff of Logo)... and while that makes it easier to learn, it's still not nearly as conventional as Java was when it was introduced.

    19. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by Ian+Bicking · · Score: 2
      Python Zope - minimum memory foortprint is about 11 megabytes
      Of course Zope is not really equivalent to either of the other given web frameworks -- Zope is a CMS. And it's got all the complexity (and memory) of a CMS. There's a lot of much lighter Python web frameworks. I personally use Webware, which uses a servlet style.
    20. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by puppetluva · · Score: 2

      Hmm. . . your Java count seems overblown to me.
      If you limited the Java container to only the services that Zope provided, then it probably would have taken about as much memory as Zope.

      The problem with Java counts like these is that Java installations containers give you the "enterprise configuration" by default. . . with easy ways to turn off features. (rather than having you scrounge around the net looking for them and installing them after you find out that they are not there).

    21. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Python: We're STILL reinventing lisp!

      Take the brackets out of Common Lisp, and replace them with indentation-sensitive syntax with a few infix kludges, and you'll be able to see what python will be like in a few years...

    22. Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages by jovlinger · · Score: 2

      hrm. A small niggle.

      If aquisition is anything like Lorenz and [temporarly lack of memory]'s Environmental Aquisition, it's based on object containment (car has door, for example), rather than dynamic call stack (opendoor calls unlockdoor).

      The latter is generally considered too confusing for words. The former is untried, but is likely very useful in some circumstances (I understand that early python servers -- bobo? -- used something like it to implement security inheritance. I _think_ bobo became zope.)

  12. TCL????? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Do people still use TCL? Really, I remember futzing with tcl/tk about 5 years ago but with all the neat stuff you can do with perl and python nowadays I don't know why you would choose TCL.

    Warmest regards.

    1. Re:TCL????? by pogle · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I originally learned Tcl/Tk about 4 years ago, but stopped using it once my job no longer required it. I took a joke course on scripting languages last fall, and the professor was in love with Tcl/Tk, but seeing as how no one cared, we learned Perl/Tk instead. The Tk widgets are the more useful part of it...Tcl was OK, but it frankly shocked me that it was still being developed actively. Anyone used the new version and can vouch for the speed boost? It was so gawd awful slow before that I couldn't bear it.

      --
      http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
    2. Re:TCL????? by stratjakt · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I never understood why anyone would use TCL ever, even when it first showed up. It's just condusive to cryptic and hard-to-read code, and dealing with everything as lists of lists of lists was a bit to wrap my head around at first.

      I guess if I used it more it'd come easier, but I just never had the need nor desire to learn beyond what was required to get an A in the course I was taking.

      Of course, there are those who believe that the more cryptic and confusing their code is, the more adept a coder it makes them; "credibility through obscurity". I never bought into that.

      --
      I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
    3. Re:TCL????? by WetCat · · Score: 1

      Yes! Tcl is a great language NOW.
      it's about 3-5 times faster than it was 5 years ago and has a lot of new features.
      Tcl is a good language, especially
      when using its object-oriented [Incr TCL]
      extension.
      Not everybody like perl. Language is a matter of taste.

    4. Re:TCL????? by WetCat · · Score: 2

      Because people are different! And they
      think different!
      It's much easier for me to think in terms
      of commands , their arguments and strings
      than in terms of functions and procedures.
      I cannot really understand Perl code,
      but TCL is easy for me.

      Cryptic things like $_ in perl and enormous contexts are also really confusing.

      In python I was astonished by the
      requrement of strict tabbing. I am not a precious person and I found this requirement hard. But in other ways Python is great language, having a lot of libraries.

    5. Re:TCL????? by Col.+Klink+(retired) · · Score: 3, Interesting
      And it never ocurred to you that in 5 years, Tcl might have made some progress as well?

      Incidentally, for those 5 years, NBC has been using Tcl in mission critical, real time applications to stream video to affiliates across the country.

      I've been using tDOM lately, a Tcl interface to the DOM. It is, quite simply, the fastest XML parser I have found.

      --

      -- Don't Tase me, bro!

    6. Re:TCL????? by mgs1000 · · Score: 1

      You need to learn TCL so you can hack your Tivo!!!!

    7. Re:TCL????? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What are you talking about? Tcl and Tk are
      being actively developed. There is a new 8.4
      release out, and yes it is faster than earlier
      versions. Were you using the 7.X series or
      something 4 years ago?

    8. Re:TCL????? by js7a · · Score: 5, Informative
      Tcl was OK, but it frankly shocked me that it was still being developed actively.

      TCLs claim to fame is its small memory use. TCL can be included as a command interpreter in other programs easily and without much bloat. There are more embedded TCL applications than any one person knows about; both in hardware and software. TCL was also first with UTF-8 support in strings, around 1998 or before, way before Perl, so there are probably more TCL CGI scripts overseas than most English users think.

      As for benchmarks, TCL is getting faster, with a huge jump from v7 to v8 and about a 25% improvement from 8.0 to 8.4a3 (scroll down to bottom of linked page.)

    9. Re:TCL????? by pogle · · Score: 2

      "And it never ocurred to you that in 5 years, Tcl might have made some progress as well?"

      Useless sarcasm aside, no it did not. It was so nasty that my development lab moved completely away from it and I gave it only passing thought, being more concerned with learning a language or 3 that might be recognized on a resume at more places besides just NBC. It might have a small active following, but Perl/PHP and various cousins are much more active, and with Perl/Tk why bother dealing with Tcl syntax any more?

      --
      http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
    10. Re:TCL????? by Vadim+Makarov · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Do people still use TCL?

      Yes. For one, OpenACS toolkit (and a lot of on-line communities built on it) uses it. TCL is a native language of AOLServer.

      --
      17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
    11. Re:TCL????? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Perl and PHP is where you are at? That's fine. I was there, and before that awk and ksh. I think tcl/tk is a logical progression for people who want to get things done quickly and have a reusable code base that doesn't look like chicken scratch perlcrap. I remind you that perl/python and all have used tcl as a beating boy though they have borrowed and stolen from it for their gui api's for many years. Yours is typical perlist doublespeak and I've heard enough of it. Like perl? Get a life.

    12. Re:TCL????? by DavidNWelton · · Score: 2, Informative

      Here are a few reasons why someone would want to use Tcl:

      1) Its implementation is beautiful. The C code is some of the cleanest and most pleasant that I've ever had the pleasure to read.

      2) The language itself is quite comprehensible, even to beginners. Python is maybe a tad easier, but Tcl is certainly not tough to pick up.

      3) You can write control structures *in* Tcl. For example, even though the language doesn't have 'do ... while', you could write it in Tcl itself.

      4) Lots of neat stuff in the implementation, like the event loop.

      5) It's extremely easy to embed and extend. It makes it incredibly easy to make your application scriptable. Also, it's not that big (although larger than Lua, for sure), so it won't bloat your app too much.

      --
      http://www.welton.it/davidw/
    13. Re:TCL????? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think TCL is the easier language to learn I've ever seen. There are really only four or so principles involved and every symbol exists for an exact purpose. Unlike perl there is generally one right way to do things, so the code is very easy to understand once you understand those four rules. You should be able to understand 80% of the language in about 5 minutes. Plus, it is really a metalanguage that really lets you build your own language. That is cool.

    14. Re:TCL????? by pogle · · Score: 2

      Ah, just laughable you are. I just learned Perl actually and am far from being a guru or a Perl activist, so your accusation of 'perlist doublespeak' falls far short. Go accuse Larry Wall. If Perl/Python stole from Tcl and made it run faster, more power to them :-P And if someone actually comments their Perl instead of intentionally obfusciating it (which sadly most people do) its much easier to read.

      Try a better troll next time. Dislike my post? Suck it, AC.

      --
      http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
    15. Re:TCL????? by tallniel · · Score: 1

      As a reasonably active member of the Tcl community, I can say that there are plenty of people using Tcl out there. The wiki grows at a tremendous rate and the newsgroup is very active. Also, NBC are not the only people using Tcl commercially - for instance AOL use it in AOLServer (as was mentioned in the round-up) and IBM use Jacl (the Java implementation of Tcl) for automating WebSphere.
      Learning a language because it looks good on your CV/Resume is perhaps not the best engineering practice, but I admit it probably gets jobs. However, surely being able to pick the right tools and apply the correct theory is fundamentally more important than excelling in a particular language?
      I like Tcl. I enjoy working with it, I'm productive, and the end results work well and reliably. Not everyone agrees with me, but that's ok so long as we can each choose what we like best. What annoys me is when people feel the need to slag off a tool based on personal or out-of-date technical reasons.
      And don't get me started on Perl syntax :-)

    16. Re:TCL????? by RevAaron · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Because when Tcl first came out, it was pretty darn original. Sure, there were languages like Common Lisp and Smalltalk, but Tcl is embeddeble and works pretty well as a part of a larger system. Now a days, Smalltalks and Lisps can do that as well, and there are at least a hundred embeddeble scripting languages. But when it came out, it was original and pretty easy to write.

      I mean, going from "function(param1, param2)" to "function param1 param2" can't be all *that* hard. :)

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
  13. Silly Rabbit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    scripts are for kids!

    Script reviews and naked girls.

    Or try Pajonet.com

    1. Re:Silly Rabbit by bsharitt · · Score: 2, Funny

      WTF! I didn't see any naked girls on the site!

    2. Re:Silly Rabbit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Did I say naked girls? I meant naked perls...

  14. Python to become dominate cross platform language by bsharitt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I hope Python integrates wxPython. With Python + wxPython, it can take on things like Java, Mono, and .Net.

  15. Tcl? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Honestly, is there any poor soul out there who codes new projects in Tcl?

    What a hideous language that is.. "Expect" is pretty cool but it gets lost under tcl sillyness.

    Has anybody fixed the whitespace/quoting bogosity in that language? Can you say x++ instead of [incr x] yet?

    Perl or Ruby or death!

    1. Re:Tcl? by WetCat · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I do! a very large project, btw.
      and please do not put your own opionion as the opinion of the masses.
      People who think in commands and strings choose TCL!

    2. Re:Tcl? by krambeck · · Score: 0

      Our platform supports Tcl as its major web language. Trust me, it SUCKS, and we are pushing alot of stuff that you use regularly, which is just insane.

    3. Re:Tcl? by velcrokitty · · Score: 1

      I've been doing automated testing for 9 years, and in every job, TCL has been the primary choice. Why TCL? First off, we could write extensions to proprietary protocols easily enough (back in 1994), easy console control via Expect, and the OO extensions are great! It was easy to code in, easy to teach, and incredibly easy to read other people's code.

      Most telecom communications test gear APIs come with TCL libraries. And nowhere else have I ever seen the merging of GPIB interfaces, TK GUI, distributed computing, console communications, and MATLAB all in one script!

      And unlike Perl, it doesn't look like a bunch of cartoon characters swearing at each other.

      --
      I stick to walls...
    4. Re:Tcl? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Saying [incr x] is probably what got you lost you silly twerp. I wonder if you can just get away with not knowing the language as well with your favorite sl::perl probably. Do you know that most sysads coming into a job that have to deal with perl code written by fruitloops like you just rewrite them so they can read them? Please stay with perl, you're doing the rest of the world a favor by limiting your damage.

    5. Re:Tcl? by Beowabbit · · Score: 2, Informative

      Honestly, is there any poor soul out there who codes new projects in Tcl?

      Well, my big project was started before Tcl/Tk had a text widget, and I think before NCSA Mosaic was written, but yes, Tcl is what I use for anything new that needs a GUI or is otherwise beyond the capabilities of a short Bourne-shell script.

      (The main thing I've written is an editor, which you can find along with a bunch of other stuff here. Please don't judge Tcl based on what I do with it in my spare time, though; there are loads of better-maintained and more ambitious Tcl projects out there.)

      Has anybody fixed the whitespace/quoting bogosity in that language? Can you say x++ instead of [incr x] yet?

      Well, the thing I like about Tcl is it's utterly fanatical self-consistency and simplicity. It's about the diametric opposite of Perl (especially pre-Perl5 Perl. Larry Wall wrote "I wanted Perl to work smoothly in the way that natural languages work smoothly, not in the way that mathematics works smoothly." Tcl works smoothly in the way that mathematics works smoothly. It's a very small, very consistent language, and that means you can keep all of it in your head even as a casual user. It's learning curve comes mainly from being simpler than other languages a new Tcl programmer may be familiar with. Yes, that means you can't write DeCSS in half a line of punctuation characters the way you can with some languages :-), but it means that when you understand the syntax you really understand it.

      Honestly, asking why you can't increment a variable by appending ++ to it in Tcl is like asking why you can't indicate the object of a verb by changing a final -us to -um in English instead of having to put the words in a particular order, or why you can't "use Getopt::Std;" in Lisp, or why you can't just push the button for the right floor in a car the way you can in an elevator.

      Tcl and Perl are both excellent languages, but they appeal to very different kinds of people. (I haven't used it much, but from what I've seen Python is somewhere in the middle - a lot of Tcl's consistency, but also a lot of syntax compared to Tcl, which lets you express things somewhat more tersely.)

      Tcl is also great at introspection, which makes it easy to write code that manipulates code.

      Tcl was originally designed as an embedded extension language, to be added on to applications in $COMPILED_LANGUAGE to provide scriptability - it was originally targetted to replace things like sendmail.cf, .fvwmrc, crontab, and that sort of thing. That particular target market drove some of the early design goals - simplicity, very minimal syntax, and small code footprint. A lot of people (somewhat to Ousterhout's surprise) started using it for serious, large apps, and (in many people's opinion) it worked really well for that, but I think a lot of the characteristics that make Tcl different from other languages stem from that origin.

      I actually wish that Tcl had had more success in its original intended niche; since it's a pain to have to learn a new incomplete and clunky mini-language with every new application you want to configure or script - and then not have them be able to talk to each other. If Guile or whatever becomes a bit more ubiquitous for that purpose I'll learn it and be content, I suppose, but I guess everybody who writes a new app wants to write a new language to go along with it rather than steal somebody else's. :-)
    6. Re:Tcl? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Tcl is a hideous piece of trash and a venial sin against the gods of programming languages. The last time I worked with it Tcl/Tk 4.2 the only way to scope variables was by file based scoping. Everything was global. John Ousterhout is a hack!

      I'm sure its fine for doing very small things, but anything serious is just wasted on Tcl.

    7. Re:Tcl? by BigJimSlade · · Score: 2

      Honestly, is there any poor soul out there who codes new projects in Tcl?

      Yeah... there's this little project called TiVo. Maybe you've heard of it. Also, quite a few of the hacks (the web interface to the TiVo that I use, for example) are written in Tcl.

      I never really liked the language myself. I'm a Python fan. But some people (and companies) are still using it.

    8. Re:Tcl? by Beowabbit · · Score: 1
      last time I worked with it Tcl/Tk 4.2 the only way to scope variables was by file based scoping. Everything was global.

      No version of Tcl/Tk has had anything like file-based scoping. In Tcl 7.6/Tk 4.2 (Tcl and Tk didn't start sharing version numbers until 8.0), there were only two scopes: variables inside a procedure were local by default, and could be global if you said so. (Global variables were shared by the entire interpreter, no matter what file they were defined in. I think Tcl 7.6 already allowed you to have multiple "interpreters" for this purpose running within the same process, but that might not have been introduced until 8.0.)

      Is that what you meant - that different procedures couldn't share variables without them being global? I'll grant you, that's an inconvenience unless you're either very disciplined or willing to pass around all the state you care about as procedure arguments.

      More recent versions of Tcl/Tk support arbitrary hierarchical namespaces so different procedures can share variables without them being global.

      It's actually really good for doing certain specific kinds of large things, too - large things where the distinction between code and data is a little fuzzy, and much of the code is generated or manipulated by the script itself. I may be wrong, because I'm not too plugged into the Perl community, but I believe people tend not to do much of that sort of thing in Perl, but in Tcl it's easy to have a procedure modify itself, or create a modified copy of itself, or modify other running procedures. That makes it good for really high-availability applications, by the way, because you can patch the running code without having to restart it. I bet that's part of why it's used at NBC, and part of why it was used in the Mars Pathfinder mission. Oh, and in the recent Ariane launch that was in the news. (Just kidding. :-)
  16. One word: Scotty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    being the best SNMP library in existance.
    No other comes close.

    Seriously, tcl isn't that bad a language once
    you get used to it. You get lists and associative
    arrays and namespaces and pretty high-level libraries (one line TCP socket server setup).
    Plus doing event-driven stuff is **REALLY* easy.
    The event-handling is built in.

    Having to do math in expr is a pain.

    Plus pretty good cross-platform capability.

    -- ac at work

  17. Re:Python to become dominate cross platform langua by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As a wxPython user I can say that, for a good reason, wxPython should not be part of Python.
    It's a complete bitch to debug your programs when the wxWindows library goes berserk, and it does, way too often.
    Btw, I think there should be no GUI toolkit at all in Python as default.

  18. Python best fits my needs by PeterClark · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Python is an amazing scripting language--I'm just wondering when gcc will be able to compile it! :) (Yes, I know about psyco.) For the next year, one thing I would like to see is either Python switching to wxPython for GUI stuff, or improving tkinter so that it isn't so...1996ish. (On the other hand, wxPython isn't quite as intuitive as pyQT, but isn't hampered by the licensing issue on the Windows side of things.) Also, what are the plans for Python 3+? Is there any site listing future plans, apart from the 2.3 release?

    :Peter

    1. Re:Python best fits my needs by skeedlelee · · Score: 2

      From the article it sounds like the Python community was having a hard time keeping up with how fast things were changing (just getting started with Python so I'm just going by the article). As a result it sounds like the next year will see more optimization than major changes. My guess is that this may mean that a Python 3 is a while off.

    2. Re:Python best fits my needs by iceburn · · Score: 1

      Supposedly the next version will be Python 3000. According to the powers that be, it won't be released "for a loooooong time -- although you won't quite have to wait until the year 3000." You can find out more here: Programming Python's Forward by Guido van Rossum. Also, there's a lot of details of the changes coming to Python 3000 here: Python 3000. ;)

      --
      A sphincter says what?
  19. Where's my visual basic?!?! by planux · · Score: 1

    What about visual basic? It's cross platform, easy to understand and uses C-like syntax. Errr... wait... that's PHP. :-) The sig is only in your mind.

  20. /. frontpage story considered useful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny
    OK, I've only skimmed it before hitting the sack and perl is the only scriptage that my paymasters allow at the moment, but I'll be checking the links on the others in due course. Nice to have a brief summary of things from the various communities all in one place.

    I especially liked this, from the Python section:

    The goals for Python 2.3 are modest compared to new-style classes. The alpha release on Dec. 31 introduced only minor language changes, like a new boolean type.
    Any language that glosses over introducing a new boolean type as a "minor" language change has got to be worth looking into....
    1. Re:/. frontpage story considered useful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The new boolean type isn't a fundamental change to the language. You'll still be able to use any arbitrary expression as an "if" or "while" condition. And you can perform arithmetic on bools just like they were still ints. (False and True will be implicitly converted to 0 and 1.)

      The change won't have any more affect on anyone's coding style than "typedef enum {false, true} boolean;" has in C.

      The only noticeable change for most people is, e.g., repr(2 + 2 == 4) will be "True" instead of "1".

  21. No Bourne? by Dan+Ost · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What? Bourne isn't interesting because it's not
    being developed anymore?

    I'm a big fan of Python, but for every Python
    script I write, I write dozens that start out
    #!/bin/sh.

    It may not be sexy, but it's maintainable (every
    admin knows it), portable (any system that has
    sh or bash), and dirt simple to write.

    --

    *sigh* back to work...
    1. Re:No Bourne? by /dev/trash · · Score: 2

      I just love the Bourne Shell.

    2. Re:No Bourne? by jschrod · · Score: 1
      Portable? You must be kidding.

      I remember a post from Larry Wall back in the early 90s - wait, google, got it:

      • I've written some scripts that work in 582 different languages,
        all of them named sh.

        Larry Wall
        lwall@netlabs.com
      Take a look at Perl's Configure, and tell me again that sh is "portable" without getting red.
      --

      Joachim

      People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]

    3. Re:No Bourne? by n1vux · · Score: 1
      What? Bourne isn't interesting because it's not being developed anymore?

      Since the quoted report discusses the ongoing development and community support activities by a self-selected group that consider themselves "loyal opposition" or "fellow travelers", yes, lack of ongoing support and peer interchange with these languages does leave SH, BASH, KSH, and CSH out of the list. What changes in *SH occurred in 2002 that you'd like mentioned?

      Other no-shows. It would have been nice if they'd invited the GAWK support community -- maybe they did and GAWK bawked due to license issues? ;-). LISP used to be used as an application-scripting language, but that's not how its support community sees it, so they wouldn't be likely to contribute to such a review either (and a fairly fragmented community it is).

      The comment on the non-portability of *sh is right-on. That's a major reason I'm writing *sh and awk scripts in Perl these days. (Not having *sh on my laptop helps too. Yes I could get one, but interoperability, portability, and price are all tradeoffs there again -- the good wintel ksh isn't the free one.) CPAN and class/modules are why I write real programs in Perl. But my scripts keep turning into real programs and vice versa now ;-)

      -- Bill, N1VUX
      I had a funny .sig when funny .sigs were funny

  22. yawwwwwwn by john_smith_45678 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Too bad there isn't really any compelling to use any of those languages, except for snob factor.

    --
    John Kerry is a Joke!
  23. Who is winning?: Let the porn industry decide! by $$$$$exyGal · · Score: 5, Funny
    We all know that the porn industry is always the first adopter of the latest and greatest technologies: And the winner is: PHP by a landslide!

    --naked

    --
    Very popular slashdot journal for adul
    1. Re:Who is winning?: Let the porn industry decide! by NineNine · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ASP: 614,000

    2. Re:Who is winning?: Let the porn industry decide! by Smallpond · · Score: 1


      visual basic 3,260,000

    3. Re:Who is winning?: Let the porn industry decide! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


      Flash = 347,000 hits

    4. Re:Who is winning?: Let the porn industry decide! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You forgot the "porn" keyword which puts it about 37000.

    5. Re:Who is winning?: Let the porn industry decide! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Java: 164,000

    6. Re:Who is winning?: Let the porn industry decide! by Vadim+Makarov · · Score: 1
      You forgot!
      --
      17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
    7. Re: Who is winning?: Let the porn industry decide! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The relatively large number for Ruby reminds me of a fact: Matz, the Ruby creator, works for a company that undertakes management of Japanese porn sites (but not a porn content holder itself).

    8. Re:Who is winning?: Let the porn industry decide! by puppetluva · · Score: 3, Funny

      Very scientific: Using your technology rating method, I've decided to use Windows, alt.sex and Brittany Spears for my next project.

    9. Re:Who is winning?: Let the porn industry decide! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      rexx 310,000 hits

    10. Re:Who is winning?: Let the porn industry decide! by connor_macleod · · Score: 1

      just out of interest (or comparison) ...
      asp: 614,000
      aspx: 5,120

  24. batch:sh::wsh:perl by Osty · · Score: 2, Informative

    That's because MSFT have replaced it with the more functional Windows Scripting Host. Haven't you been paying attention to all the WSH security issues?

    Incorrect. CMD/Batch scripting is still alive and well, and much more powerful in its cmd.exe "cmd scripting" form than it ever was in the DOS "batch scripting" days. Batch/CMD is to sh as WSH is to perl (especially since you can use perl to write WSH code -- WSH is not a language, but a framework that can support many languages).

  25. tcl/tk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    a nice little scripting language. I love it for quick dirty little gui interfaces (to bastardize?) command line interfaces for grandma. Na, seriously, it's a great scripting language, it has a lot of neat widgets, it loads really fast, and it does the job when it needs to. (and I don't feel like screwing with something more complex)

    1. Re:tcl/tk by msfodder · · Score: 1

      Mod this up.
      Everyone except perlphuques know tcl rocks.

      --
      ..Free Live Free...
  26. PHP is great and so is Smalltalk. by crovira · · Score: 1

    Server side RULES dude...

    --
    MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
    1. Re:PHP is great and so is Smalltalk. by thebatlab · · Score: 1

      Yes, server side does rule....if you need a server side solution :) Perl can be used as a server side solution as can really any other scripting language if you think about it.

    2. Re:PHP is great and so is Smalltalk. by RevAaron · · Score: 2

      Sure, Smalltalk does rule. But it's not usually put in the category of a "scripting language." It's more than that, or at least people usually consider it as being such. I don't really see much of a difference than most modern "scripting" languages and general purpose languages, but Smalltalk is definately a general purpose language, for creating operating environments, end user apps, and web apps, rather than just scripts.

      That said, you can sure use Perl and its friends for real apps, even though it can get a bit awkward compared to using a language designed for being general purpose like Smalltalk, Common Lisp or even (eww) Java.

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
  27. PHP 2003 year-in-review by dananderson · · Score: 3, Informative
    PHP 2003 year-in-review (or go to http://php.net/ and click on "PHP Look Back 2002."

    BTW, PHP news is available in RDF format as a Slashbox. Go to your Slashdot "preferences" to add.

    As for Language wars, no language is better, it's just a better tool for a particular job.

  28. Perl Data Language for scientific work by Dr.+Zowie · · Score: 5, Informative
    Perl really has come a long way from its scripting roots -- by itself, it's useful for "small to midsize" computing tasks (says the documentation) but the value of "midsize" keeps shifting to larger and larger things.

    Perl Data Language (http://pdl.perl.org) is a set of C and FORTRAN bindings that make perl into a complete vectorized scientific-computing language that's useful for big tasks like inverting 1000x1000 matrices or fluid-dynamic simulation, but that can also be used interactively to work with image and spectral data.

    That's neat because interactive data analysis is a pretty small niche market with a few proprietary (and, IMHO, seriously broken) languages dominating. With PDL, I can give fresh science data to high school students, straight from the spacecraft. Their L337 gaming machines are plenty powerful enough to run the tools they need, and perl is pretty much universal.

    1. Re:Perl Data Language for scientific work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I'm right behind you on using PDL, but in order to be particularly viable for scientific exchange you need to convince at least one other member of your particular research community to use it! Otherwise you're apparently spending the bulk of your grant money reinventing the wheel instead of reusing the vast pool of "other leading brand" software out there, which is box-stock compatible with the rest of your contemporaries.

      One other thing: "Natural Language, my *ss!"

      Dr. AnonymousCoward

    2. Re:Perl Data Language for scientific work by Dr.+Zowie · · Score: 2
      Interesting you should point that out, Joe. PDL appears to have the most penetration in stellar astronomy, but at least one solar physics group at CU has installed it recently.

      It's probably not worthwhile to try to replace the bulk of the analysis software that already exists with PDL -- but on the other hand, I've in general had better luck working in PDL than trying to get third-party freeware to work in (e.g.) IDL.

    3. Re:Perl Data Language for scientific work by scrytch · · Score: 2

      How does Perl Data Language compare with Numeric Python? numpy is awesome stuff, and PDL looks rather similar. Anywhere where PDL shines that numpy doesn't, or vice versa? Or is it mostly a matter of language preference?

      --
      I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
    4. Re:Perl Data Language for scientific work by Dr.+Zowie · · Score: 3, Informative
      I've looked at numpy briefly. I believe that, starting from scratch, it might be easier to learn -- perl is a write-only language at first.

      PDL has really excellent dimensional manipulation and slicing; and the PGPLOT output is very nice. For me, the main advantage over python is that, well, it's just perl -- so you have access to the whole CPAN library for (e.g.) database I/O, units conversion, uu{en|de}coding, and whatnot.

    5. Re:Perl Data Language for scientific work by Ian+Bicking · · Score: 2
      Just to clarify, Numeric Python is just Python as well -- it's just a set of modules. It doesn't require a separate interpreter, and it doesn't preclude using the full range of Python modules available.

      Python still doesn't have as many modules as Perl, but it has enough. And of course they both have vastly more than MATLAB.

      In the Python world Numeric is also used for a lot of non-scientific data work. Games are popular, for instance -- anyplace where the overhead of Python objects is too much. You can cram lots of floats into a Numeric array compared to a normal Python list (which can be heterogeneous). It becomes an interesting way to solve some of the problems associated with dynamic languages; I'm sure Perl can use PDL similarly.

    6. Re:Perl Data Language for scientific work by Random+Walk · · Score: 2

      I don't have any experience with PDL, but the name clearly alludes to IDL. Does that mean that there is any compatibility between both ? Can PDL interpret an IDL macro ?

  29. or awk by DrSkwid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    awk essential for pipe work.

    you'll see it here used like
    wget -O - http://domain/info.html | awk -f proc.awk | mysql -u news newsdb

    rc shell and it's unix implmentation

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
    1. Re:or awk by the+gnat · · Score: 2

      I actually started programming for real in Awk. The postdoc I was working for knew Awk and C, but not Perl (which, since I'm in bioinformatics, is the de facto standard). So I began learning Awk, and used that until I had to start doing CGI scripts. I still go back to it occasionally; I've written entire BLAST parsers in Awk alone. When I need a very simple, small text-processing script, Awk is usually my first choice, even though I write virtually all my code in Perl.

    2. Re:or awk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You can do just about anything with gawk 3.1

      As a matter of fact even the traditionally bad features of awk(single file processing, linear
      reads, etc..)can be so easily worked around in
      userspace that the maintainer doesn't even listen
      to suggestions for core features about these.

      The excellently simple network capable api that
      has been implemented renders utilities like
      netcat obsolete in many situations because a throwaway server app that does everything you
      need is just 90-100 lines of code awy.

    3. Re:or awk by swagr · · Score: 2

      While we're on the subject of awk,
      here's a Lisp implementation in awk.

      While we're on the subject of Lisp... well, those of you who know, know. The others might learn one day.

      --

      -... --- .-. . -.. ..--..
    4. Re:or awk by RevAaron · · Score: 2

      I do work in what could be considered bioinformatics [1]. My boss still uses awk for scripting and processing our ecological and metereological data. Hell, he even writes CGI scripts in it. When he wants to visualize what does he do? Write an AWK script that outputs a POVray file... heh. No wonder everyone was impressed when I wrote the cool Squeak app for browsing and comparing multiple plots along a transcect all in one screen and all in a couple seconds. :P

      [1] Although it's not genomics or anything, rather informatics and computer science applied to ecology.

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
  30. PHP is also for batch pre-processing by dananderson · · Score: 3, Insightful
    HTML is not a programming language because it has no branch and control and looping constructs.

    PHP now has a batch mode intended for preprocessing. That is, periodically generating static HTML from PHP pages.

  31. Note to moderators by Camel+Pilot · · Score: 2

    This piece of crap is posted every time a Perl topic comes around. It is a repost from here

    A few clues to its troll content:

    While I wouldn't use its to code the new Doom (VB would be a better choice)

    Perl lacks a graphics library of any kind.

  32. A few replies by jbolden · · Score: 4, Informative

    Since most of this is about your experience there is not much anyone else can say but...

    After about a day I had an excellent understanding of both PHP and SQL.

    I don't know PHP but you don't have an excellent understanding of SQL in one day. Its not a that hard but ain't that easy either. Rather what is probably true is that you have an excellent understanding of how to write SQL to get information from the types of simple database with simple underlying business rules.

    The modern SQL spec runs 2000 pages you don't have an excellent understanding of 2% of that in one day.

    This is because Perl isn't OO (so you can't create Node classes, for example, usefull in a linked list) and because it lacks pointers.

    I don't know what you are talking about. If X is a type of object then X's are passed around as pointers (see bless). Arrays in Perl are linked lists so an array of X's is a linked list, that's why you use things like push, pop, shift, etc... on arrays in Perl.

    As for graphics Perl libraries support a wide range of graphics formats.

    There are some other things like your comments about the regex engine that I highly doubt. No regex engine has had the time, attention and work of Perl's, Its not Perl's strong suit because of some sort of myth, for example Perl's grep has outperformed the native grep on Solaris. My guess is that the failure lies with you on this one.

    1. Re:A few replies by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Man, those linked lists look like a bitch to maintain too huh..That's what you get for having
      the language designed by a wannabee bible thumper.
      A revision every time something starts to get
      really clumsy.

      He should have used hash tables like every other self respecting interpreted language.

  33. Tcl has already seen it's day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...and it's on its way out.
    TCL's "everything's a string" model is flawed.
    It's also the slowest interpreted language out there for this very reason - the VM cannot decipher what is the intent of the programmer because there are so few clues in the language syntax itself.
    Anyway there's no Tcl buzz anymore as there is with Python, Ruby and PHP.
    Nothing to see here - please move along.

    1. Re:Tcl has already seen it's day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, we see that you have decided to puke out
      your prejudices rather than keep up with tcl development.

      Tcl no longer treats everything as a string
      but everything still looks like a string.

      As far as your statistics go..try similar operations and flexibility with perl without stealing ideas from tk.
      That'll wipe the shit off your upper lip fer sure..

      BTW: Thank Sun for the bloat factor that held
      tcl back..it could have been tcl rather than
      java now dimwit.

    2. Re:Tcl has already seen it's day... by Col.+Klink+(retired) · · Score: 5, Informative
      You do realize that the "everything is a string" model has been gone for nearly 5 years... It's also been using a byte-code compiler for just as long, so no, it's not the slowest thing out there. In fact, the tDOM XML parser/XSLT engine is extremely fast. Quoting the link:
      The final results? Ade summarizes: "Under Linux tDOM SAX is 4 times faster than Java, under Windows 3 times. tDOM DOM is around 4 times faster than the fastest Java solution under both platforms." Memory tests confirmed Ade's own intensive experience over 18 months of working with DOM commercially: "the tDOM DOM tree needs typically between 2 and 3.5 times memory of the XML file size ..." Common DOM parsing engines in commercial use bound to C and Java frequently require five to 30 (!) times as much memory as the base document.
      --

      -- Don't Tase me, bro!

  34. LUA getting some attention... by vga_init · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Earlier this year I had to use LUA in a project that I was working on, and I must admit that it was a pretty interesting language. I had to use it primarly for scipting: writing generic function calls and tailoring formatted "pages" of code to be submitted into a database (one might think of this as being similar to web pages, though it a little bit different than that). To me the language seemed to be very versatile, and it had some nifty features as well as very simplistic syntax. To someone familiar with other languages like Perl or Python, I guess it might not seem so nifty, but I appreciated its simplicity because it took me less than an hour to learn as much of the language as I needed for the project.

    1. Re:LUA getting some attention... by RevAaron · · Score: 2

      I agree, Lua is a pretty fun language. It's pretty darn fast, too, considering what it is. And it's small- the default binary installation is only about 200k! WOWZA! Sure, not all the libraries as Perl or Python by default, but strip anything else in the same class else down to the same functionality and it's sure to be bigger.

      Then again, I'm got a big soft-spot in my heart for NewtonScript, after which Lua was modeled. :)

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
  35. Programming down the toilet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Why did they name a scripting language after a Hawaiian bathroom? The word, "lua" is Hawaiian for "bathroom." (Tourists who can't say luau (loo-ow) often talk about eating some great food in the lua (loo-ah)).

    1. Re:Programming down the toilet... by leoboiko · · Score: 3, Informative

      "Lua" is Portuguese for "Moon". Lua is a Brazilian project.

      --
      Prescriptive grammar:linguistics :: alchemy:chemistry. Stop being a nazi and learn some science.
  36. mod parent up -nt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    no text

  37. There is just better languages, though by Jayson · · Score: 1
    If you want to deal with vectorized data, then use a vector language. Language, such as K are made for that and are much better than Perl at vector operations. It really doesn't make sense to use Perl for it. K is a smaller language, it is simplier, and if you are used to mathematical notation it is probably easier to learn.

    I even use K as my favorite general purpose language, I like it so much. There is even a simple introduction written about it at Kuro5hin.

    1. Re:There is just better languages, though by Dr.+Zowie · · Score: 2
      It's a matter of preference. The PDL extensions are fully vectorized -- the perl engine sees a vector PDL object as just an opaque object with extensive operator overloading, so in addition to scalars, lists, hashes, and refs you also have PDLs.

      K certainly looks interesting, tho'.

  38. No thanks, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    PHP is half baked and frequently doesn't work as documented.

    1. Re:No thanks, by neur0maniak · · Score: 1

      I've used it for over a year on linux and windows machines. With no cross-platform problems. The manual tells you specifically which commands are platform only, and you do your best to avoid them.

      I don't think that PHP is a poor language. I haven't actually used to make sales sites, but I've not needed to. It may be where it falls down, but which "typical guy/gal with a (dynamic) website" really needs to be able to sell stuff?

    2. Re:No thanks, by gregmac · · Score: 1
      PHP has perhaps the best manual of any language. It's updated frequently, shows you what versions and platforms each function is available in, explains changes from previous versions (if any), and most have examples and user comments that explain common problems people have.

      If there does happen to be a situation where it doesn't work as documented (and it's a production version, not beta/release candidate/cvs), post it at bugs.php.net and it will get fixed.

      --
      Speak before you think
    3. Re:No thanks, by RichardX · · Score: 1

      "PHP has perhaps the best manual of any language. "

      I have to second this. As a disclaimer, I'm no PHP zealot - only tried it out for the first time three days ago, and am still undecided on which scripting language I want to use, but PHP's documentation on www.PHP.net impressed the hell out of me. It's well laid out, thorough, and just about every page has user submitted tips, tricks, and example source. I wish this were the rule rather than the exception.. only too frequently learning a new language is seriously hampered by trying to wade through incomprehensibly technical documentation when all you're trying to do is learn how to specify a FOR loop in the language

      --
      Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
  39. Brian W. Kernighan's scripting language shootout by Jayson · · Score: 5, Informative
    BWK wrote a paper on this: Timing Trials, or, the Trials of Timing: Experiments with Scripting and User-Interface Languages. It compared C, Awk, Perl, Tcl, Java, Visual Basic, Limbo, and Scheme. It tested various areas of the language, such as graphics, text processing, and array manipulation.

    Although K really isn't a scripting langauge (neither is C), results were done for it, too (being faster and having less code). There is also a shallow introduction to K on Kuro5hin.org.

  40. Reading Between the Lines by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is this really "news" or "a calculated career move dressed up as news"?

    "L00K M4, L00K1T M333!"

  41. Rexx has no equal. by Wargames · · Score: 3, Funny

    For scripting, there are not equals to Rexx the king of scripting languages.

    The programming language Rexx runs great as Regina on Linux/UNIX/NT, or Rexx under OS2 Warp or NT is cross platform with minimal changes.

    Rexx http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/rexx/
    Regina http://regina-rexx.sourceforge.net/

    Can your scripting language do this out of the box:

    -Wargames

    Powers of 2:

    say 2**100
    1267650600228229401496703205376

    say 2**150
    142724769270595988105828596944949513638274 6624

    --
    -- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
    1. Re:Rexx has no equal. by RevAaron · · Score: 2

      Most folks would consider Smalltalk more than just a scripting language, but it can do that easily out of the box. Heck, on my 500 MHz G3 (fast enough for me, but "lowly" to plenty of people these days), Squeak Smalltalk (a relatively slower Smalltalk compared to the commercial implementations) it only takes one second to compute 4 raisedTo: 2000, that is, 4 ** 2000. "1000 factorial" takes a couple of seconds though- but that's not all that bad considering most languages can't support such large numbers out of the box. :)

      Can Rexx do that? Just out of curiousity. Smalltalk can, a lot of Lisps can, but I'd love to add other languages to the list.

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
    2. Re:Rexx has no equal. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      yes you idiot, python can do this out of the box

    3. Re:Rexx has no equal. by rjb · · Score: 1

      > 2->pow(1500);
      Result: 35074662110434038747627587960280857993524015880330 82882407579802479096385056332220365708088658496926 16531504067954375173992945489414699597541710389180 04700847889956485329097264486802711583462946536682 18434013862945135545826494634252538361938931496064 46650525517514423355092491733611303557961097098855 80674313954210217657847432626760733004753275317192 13367470356337278329704199322705266333366850995200 01750533555290588804341825383867155236837132085493 76
      > 2->pow(15000);
      [ I'll spare you the result, but it's delivered instantly ]

      > version();
      (4) Result: "Pike v7.4 release 13"

      Surf to http://pike.ida.liu.se/ :)

    4. Re:Rexx has no equal. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      4 ** 2000: 0.12 s, 1205 digits
      1000 factorial: 0.55 s, 2568 digits
      300 MHz G3 OS/2
      (would be faster if not interpreted: pmrexx rexxtry, interpret executes a string)
      displaying the digits is slower though.

      This is bignum, scientific notation factorial
      is 0.02 s

      HTH
      Wolfgang

    5. Re:Rexx has no equal. by Bob+Uhl · · Score: 2
      [ruhl@warmachine ruhl]$ guile -v
      Guile 1.3.4
      Copyright (c) 1995, 1996, 1997 Free Software Foundation
      Guile may be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence;
      certain other uses are permitted as well. For details, see the file
      `COPYING', which is included in the Guile distribution.
      There is no warranty, to the extent permitted by law.
      [ruhl@warmachine ruhl]$ guile
      guile> (expt 4 2000)
      1318204093430943100103889794236591363184019 16109327276909280345024175692811283445510797521231 72122033140940756480716823038446817694240581281731 06245251218403854467444438688895632897064277199393 00365865529242495144888321833894158323756200092849 22608946111038578754077913265440918583125586050431 64728460363649082385000782681167246890021068910448 80894853471921527088201197650061259448583977618746 69301278745233504796586994514054435217053803732703 24028340081592616934836479947271609457689400724316 86625688866030658324868306061250176433564697324072 52874567217733694824236675323341755681839221954693 82045607202025388437122682684485863619421287513956 65874453900680147479758139717481147704392488266886 67129237954128555841874460665729630492658600179338 27257911002088122876736120060347897312016889399757 43537276539989692230927982557016660679726989062369 21628764772837915526086464389161570534616956703744 84050297527909408758729896842351653162609089838935 14490200568512210790489667188789433092320719785756 39877208621237040940126912767610658141079378758043 40361142545474418057715085520493716346090251273255 12605396392214570059772472666763440181556475095153 96711351487546062479444592779055555421362722504575 706910949376
      guile> (debug-set! stack 0)
      (stack 0 debug depth 20 maxdepth 1000 frames 3 indent 10 width 79 procnames cheap)
      guile> (fact 1000)
      4023872600770937735437024339230039857193748 64210714632543799910429938512398629020592044208486 96940480047998861019719605863166687299480855890132 38296699445909974245040870737599188236277271887325 19779505950995276120874975462497043601418278094646 49629105639388743788648733711918104582578364784997 70124766328898359557354325131853239584630755574091 14262417474349347553428646576611667797396668820291 20737914385371958824980812686783837455973174613608 53795345242215865932019280908782973084313928444032 81231558611036976801357304216168747609675871348312 02547858932076716913244842623613141250878020800026 16831510273418279777047846358681701643650241536913 98281264810213092761244896359928705114964975419909 34222156683257208082133318611681155361583654698404 67089756029009505376164758477284218896796462449451 60765353408198901385442487984959953319101723355556 60213945039973628075013783761530712776192684903435 26252000158885351473316117021039681759215109077880 19393178114194545257223865541461062892187960223838 97147608850627686296714667469756291123408243920816 01537808898939645182632436716167621791689097799119 03754031274622289988005195444414282012187361745992 64295658174662830295557029902432415318161721046583 20367869061172601587835207515162842255402651704833 04226143974286933061690897968482590125458327168226 45806652676995865268227280707578139185817888965220 81643483448259932660433676601769996128318607883861 50279465955131156552036093988180612138558600301435 69452722420634463179746059468257310379008402443243 84656572450144028218852524709351906209290231364932 73497565513958720559654228749774011413346962715422 84586237738753823048386568897646192738381490014076 73104466402598994902222217659043399018860185665264 85061799702356193897017860040811889729918311021171 22984590164192106888438712185564612496079872290851 92968193723886426148396573822911231250241866493531 43970137428531926649875337218940694281434118520158 01412334482801505139969429015348307764456909907315 24332782882698646027898643211390835062170950025973 89863554277196742822248757586765752344220207573630 56949882508796892816275384886339690995982628095612 14509948717012445164612603790293091208890869420285 10640182154399457156805941872748998094254742173582 40106367740459574178516082923013535808184009699637 25242305608559037006242712434169090041536901059339 83835777939410970027753472000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000
      guile>

      The exponential was instantaneous, while the factorial took about 3/4 second. This is on a 300 MHz Pentium II (594.73 BogoMIPS). On my home machine (2,299 BogoMIPS) the factorial is also essentially instantaneous.

  42. Ferite by JoshRendlesham · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's also good to see newer scripting languages like Ferite progressing as well.

  43. What is a scripting language ? by trouser · · Score: 1

    I work as a programmer. I do most of my work in Python, some C and Objective-C,occasioanlly Java and , with a view to writing Mozilla XUL apps, I guess I'll be learning some Javascript. I see scripting languages as being programming languages which are designed to automate the functions of applications, GUI frameworks, operating systems, whatever. For example Applescript allows you to script interactions with Mac apps and the Mac OS. VBScript does the same with Windows and Javascript does something similar with web browsers and the DOM. Languages like Python, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, etc. are interpreted languages and programs written in them are sometimes referred to as scripts but I don't think it is correct to call them scripting languages. They are true programming languages, without the limitations of a scripting language. The real distinction here is that they are all interpreted rather than compiled.

    --
    Now wash your hands.
    1. Re:What is a scripting language ? by Rick+BigNail · · Score: 1

      This has a potential to become a askslashdot question.

      Any language could be used for 'scripting' as long as it is designed to be embeddable. So javascript and tcl (and Rexx, elisp...) are the best representives of scripting languages.

      From programming point of view, the difference between scripting and programming language now depends on how easy it is to produce mid to large size program without using many data structures.

      Just see how string is a basic language feature.

      You could easily tell that all traditional scripting language have string defined in the language, whereas programming language have string defined in the libraries.

      Of course, all IMHO.

  44. They barely mentioned Parrot... by bahwi · · Score: 4, Informative

    Parrot isn't the VM for Perl6. Parrot is a "new language from the creators of Perl and Python." Duh. There's even an O'Reilly book on it.

    Seriously though. They barely mentioned Parrot and Parrot is coming along very nicely I think. Even with a Java to Parrot Bytecode program, Brainfuck, Jako, Befunge-93, cola, forth, miniperl, ook, (non-final) perl6 interpreters/compilers, as well as python, ruby and scheme interpreters/compilers coming. Of course it's not finished, so not all of the languages are either, but hey, it's getting there, and damn fast. There's even a Parrot Assembly Lange.

    Parrot is definately not Perl6. It's much more. It's like java, but open source, and independent of Languages. They're hoping to have it compile on as many platforms as perl does now, unlike Java which is Windows, Mac, Linux, and some PDAs, end of story.

    So everyone check it out and throw some patches in too! Of course, the only support I've given so far is moral support. :/

    1. Re:They barely mentioned Parrot... by adrox · · Score: 1

      It's nice how the moderates gave him informative while he recited an April fool's joke.

    2. Re:They barely mentioned Parrot... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Well, that's probably because the "April fool's joke" became an actual project that IS being actively developed. :)

    3. Re:They barely mentioned Parrot... by BigJimSlade · · Score: 2

      I don't know much about Parrot, but hearing you describe it makes it sound a lot like the CLR/CLI/whateveritsnameis aspect of the .NET platform. It basically sounds like you can "byte-compile" Perl, Python, Ruby, or any number of other languages down to this byte code and run it through a Parrot interpreter, allowing you to use Python libs in Perl scripts and vice versa, for any supported language. This is the part about the .NET environment that intrigued me the most.

      Is this correct? If so, I'm surprised that the open source community isn't making a bigger deal about this. Seems like a godsend for working with cross language libraries and modules.

  45. From the "IP all over you" department by Skevin · · Score: 2

    > It's so powerful, no wonder it's #1.

    And speaking of #1, I was reading the article out to my business partners, who heard me say "Joint Urine Review".

    They began wondering exactly when programmers were getting drug-tested?

    Solomon

    --
    "Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
  46. VBScript by unfortunateson · · Score: 3, Informative

    The real missing item is VBScript. Sure, it's 99% Windoze (1% Macintosh -- who probably don't realize they have it). It's the engine behind ASP -- which isn't a language in its own right. It's the replacement for DOS Shell scripts/batch files. It's the preferred platform for management scripts on Win2K/WinXP (see WMI) It's the preferred platform for trojan horse programs... maybe I shouldn't claim that as a positive, huh? Probably Javascript should have been mentioned too, but it's rarely used as shell-style scripting. Why do I use VBScript when I've got Perl and Python on the same machine? Frobbable code at Microsoft's website. If nothing else, I prototype it there, then acces the same COM objects through Python or Perl.

    --
    Design for Use, not Construction!
    1. Re:VBScript by Captain+Large+Face · · Score: 2

      I may be incorrect, but can you not also use JavaScript to interface with ASP?

    2. Re:VBScript by ghost. · · Score: 1

      Just curious, will Microsoft continue to offer VBScript in the future, in light of VB.NET? It seems to be a doomed language for server-side web pages, now that MS wants all their web developers to migrate to ASP.NET. I suppose it might live on in the form of VBA in Office, Outlook and the like. Whatever.

      --
      Bush is a cylon.
    3. Re:VBScript by bozone · · Score: 1

      IIRC vbscript is history with .net, i think jscript remains however

      --
      "Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated" ...George Bernard Shaw
    4. Re:VBScript by unfortunateson · · Score: 2

      Exactly my point -- ASP isn't the language, it's the environment. VBScript, JavaScript, PerlScript, Ruby? can all be used within HTML pages in IE, I'm not sure about other browsers.

      --
      Design for Use, not Construction!
    5. Re:VBScript by RevAaron · · Score: 2

      Well, I think MS sees a lot of it's ASP+VBScript developers to jump to ASP.NET using COBOL as soon as they realize that C# and J# aren't the only options for coding in ASP.NET. COBOL for web apps- who has the strength not to jump ship to Microsoft's platform? :P

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
    6. Re:VBScript by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      JScript.NET isn't really a scripting language. It's compiled and strongly typed (and also mega-fugly).

      To top it off, it runs no legacy JavaScript code. Basically a waste of time when you have C# right there. (What was the point of turning a cut-down version of Java into a full-fledged version of Java?)

    7. Re:VBScript by Major+Woody · · Score: 0

      Actually, JavaScript is about as cut-down a version of Java as Perl is a cut-down version of C++. Other than a few similarities to the standard control structures used in the language and some keywords, JavaScript is a completely different language. Netscape only called it "JavaScript" to jump on the "Java" marketing bandwagon at the time.

    8. Re:VBScript by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In fact, they had already called it "LiveScript" but then renamed it for the bandwagon. Shame, it's a pretty cool prototype-based OOPL that's been ignored apart from making HTML documents unusable.

  47. scripting languages.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    who the fuck cares... use a real programming language...

  48. Re:Python to become dominate cross platform langua by RevAaron · · Score: 2

    Where can I find a package for Mac OS X 10.2 for Python+wxPython? Until then, it still won't be actually cross-platform, at least to me. Sure, it supports desktop systems running Window (93%?) and Unix (3%?) but that4% of the Mac OS is what I usually use, so as a user (and a developer), it's worth about as much as MFC until it supports my platform. :)

    --

    Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
  49. What about REBOL? by RevAaron · · Score: 2

    I know this could get me killed here, but ....

    REBOL always looked pretty cool to me. Well, not always. At first, it seemed pretty ugly and special-case centrik, but when I took the time to read a bit, it was apparent that it is very much so a Scheme interpreter with some pretty darn interesting (and novel) features and a syntax that is more digestable for people coming from shitty languages. I've used it some at work solely out of pragmatism- I've been able to write little GUI apps with less code than Tk and a helluva lot less than with Perl/Tk.

    That said, it is hardly without flaws. It has plenty. It's completely closed, and while I'm not the kind of purpose who bitches about that (like some of us here!), it impedes REBOL's adoption and use. I ended up more or less ditching it for my personal and work use because I can't develop for it on my Mac OS X machine, at least not with a GUI app. Sure, there's an X11 version, but because it's completely closed and they haven't recompiled it for OS X + X11, I can even run that under OS X. There's an OS 9 version, but I not starting up Classic just for REBOL.

    Anyone else here looked at REBOL for more than a tiny acursory glance?

    --

    Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
    1. Re:What about REBOL? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I use Rebol at work, it's great. It makes writing networking code very simple, and I use it for a lot of one-shot data proccessing scripts.

    2. Re:What about REBOL? by Ian+Bicking · · Score: 2

      I looked ar Rebol some -- it was cute, but I failed to see how it was as cool as they were trying to say it was. It's really based on Logo, not so much Scheme (though the two languages are cousins). I looked at it because I was interested in what a properly fleshed out Logo implementation could look like.

  50. Don't forget Moto by corz · · Score: 2, Informative
    The Moto Programming Language had a pretty good year in 2002.

    It even got a mention on Slashdot.

  51. Ruby can... by Colonel+Panic · · Score: 3, Funny

    Can Rexx do:
    2**1000 :
    10715086071862673209484250490600018105614048117 055 33607443750388370351051124936122493198378815695858 12759467291755314682518714528569231404359845775746 98574803934567774824230985421074605062371141877954 18215304647498358194126739876755916554394607706291 45711964776865421676604298316526243868372056680693 76 ...but really, how does being able to do this mean that a scripting language 'has no equal'...

    Or when you say that 'Rexx has no equal' do you mean that you can't check for equality in Rexx? ...must be pretty tough...

  52. Re:Brian W. Kernighan's scripting language shootou by Slashamatic · · Score: 2

    K is sort of excluded as it is closed at the moment, as is VB. The interesting thing about the script languages in this article is that they are all open, with free implementations available.

  53. Too many languages by kalislashdot · · Score: 1

    Lau, Ruby, never heard of them. Shoot the first time I heard smalltalk was in a CS class a few years ago. Their are jsut too many languages, it is boggleing to the mind. I personally started with Perl for dynamic websites. Then I evolved to PHP. My current job is Java happy so I am trying to figure out JSP wishing it were PHP. I hate Ints, Strings and Null Pointer Exceptions. Arg!! Anyway I just wanted to comment on how I think there are too many programming languages in the world. It streaches the talent too thin.

    1. Re:Too many languages by vague · · Score: 1

      Then you're really going to hate this:
      http://sk.nvg.org/lang/lang.html
      or
      http: //www.hypernews.org/HyperNews/get/computing/l ang-list.html

      --

      -
      Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.

  54. We don't use Perl in North Korea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...because TMTOWTDI doesn't jive with our spirit of sharing, and frankly we don't like Larry Wall one bit. Python, however, fits the bill very nicely and doesn't croak on our cold-war era hardware. >64MB of memory is so...petit bourgeois.

    All hail the Dear Leader!

    Death to Bill Gates the imperialist pig who is screwing over the Third World! Windows XP won't run on our Russian computers! Please send us fuel oil and food! Oh, and fuck Steve Jobs too. If we had $100 to blow (and we don't), we wouldn't spend it on a BSD we can get for free! And blackbox looks better than Aqua anyway!

    Please come visit us in Pyongyang. I'll take you to all hot spots.

    Song Sang-won
    VP of Marketing
    Citibank North Korea

  55. ASP not a scripting language by toriver · · Score: 2

    ASP isn't a language, but a technology that uses a scripting language, frequently VB-Script. But the language can be any that registers as Windows Scripting Host, e.g. Python or PerlScript from ActiveState.

  56. Jython by toriver · · Score: 2
    Jython 2.1 on java1.4.1_01 (JIT: null)
    Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> from java.math import BigInteger
    >>> b = BigInteger("4")
    >>> b.pow(2000)
    1318204093430943100103889794236591363 18401916109327276909280345024175692811283445510797 52123172122033140940756480716823038446817694240581 28173106245251218403854467444438688895632897064277 19939300365865529242495144888321833894158323756200 09284922608946111038578754077913265440918583125586 05043164728460363649082385000782681167246890021068 91044880894853471921527088201197650061259448583977 6187466930127
    87452335047965869945140544352170538 03732703240283400815926169348364799472716094576894 00724316866256888660306583248683060612501764335646 97324072528745672177336948242366753233417556818392 21954693820456072020253884371226826844858636194212 87513956658744539006801474797581397174811477043924 88266886671292379541285558418744606657296304926586 00179338272579110020881228767361200603478973120168 89399757435372765399896922309279825570166606797269 89062369216287647728379155260864643891615705346169 56703744840502975279094087587298968423516531626090 89838935144902005685122107904896671887894330923207 19785756398772086212370409401269127676106581410793 78758043403611425454744180577150855204937163460902 51273255126053963922145700597724726667634401815564 75095153967113514875460624794445927790555554213627 22504575706910949376
    >>>

    Answer appeared instantly on my lowly P3-800.

    1. Re:Jython by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And where do you think Java got its BigInteger class from? Rexx; that's where ;-) Mike Cowlishaw, author of Rexx, was the principal designer of the Java BigInteger class.

  57. One caveat about this paper... by alispguru · · Score: 2

    The paper is dated 1997 (published 1998). All of the languages tested have changed significantly since that time. Scheme in particular has grown several significant implementations like Scheme 48, the substrate for scsh, the Scheme shell, and Kawa, a Scheme that compiles to Java bytecodes.

    --

    To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
  58. Re:Except by CyberDruid · · Score: 2

    That the community is more alive, the libraries are better organized, no one likes prefix math and companies does not run away screaming when they hear the name. Scheme and Common LISP are stagnant.

    LISP is damn cool, it just needs some syntactic sugar and libs. It might become a 'hip language' again if stuff like arc or goo ever gets anywhere (and some fanatics suddenly implements a shitload of useful libraries for them).

    --

    Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati

  59. Io by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Here's a new scripting language that was released in 2002: http://www.dekorte.com/software/c/Io/

  60. Re:Brian W. Kernighan's scripting language shootou by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I can't understand what does through the mind of a designer for languages like perl and k. It's like they just scan their keyboard for symbols they haven't used yet and then apply some arbitrary meaning to them.

    k looks like line noise on a modem.

    Truly a terrible language.

  61. Re:Tcl? Of course! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    > Honestly, is there any poor soul out there
    > who codes new projects in Tcl?

    Many people do. I won't use anything else if I can. It just fits my mental processes better.

    Tcl is not an old thing, it got an early start that's all.

    > What a hideous language that is.. "Expect"
    > is pretty cool but it gets lost under tcl
    > sillyness.

    So why was it written in Tcl and not in perl?

    > Perl or Ruby or death!

    If you replaced your ORs with ANDs you could become a real tcler!

  62. Re:Except by GnuVince · · Score: 1

    I have high hopes for Arc. Paul Graham knows that hackers like the practical side of Perl and Python, but he also knows that just replicating them won't get anywhere. Instead, a Lisp dialect that is highly practical makes me hard instantly!

  63. Re:Brian W. Kernighan's scripting language shootou by muchandr · · Score: 1

    Would you consider a language like K if your code got 100 times smaller? A 1000 times? I mean, at some point it's got to be worth it. K code is so extremely dense so that you could grok the whole thing at once. (no K program is ever supposed to go over a single page :) I've personally replaced 2.5K lines of Java (132 character wide, mind you) with just 4 lines of K.

  64. No, that's APL: Re: Ugly Line Noise Languages by billstewart · · Score: 1

    Don't get me wrong, I liked APL, and its model of "You shoot all the bullets at all the feet, then select the feet that belong to you" was really nice for doing time-series analysis. But it is somewhat nice to have language designers who at least stick to an ASCII keyboard to find weird symbols from :-)

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  65. Background music for this discussion by billstewart · · Score: 1
    Eternal Flame (God Wrote in Lisp), Julia Ecklar singing Bob Kanefsky's parody of Julia Ecklar's song "God Lives on Terra", accompanied by Julia Ecklar and guitar wizard Kristoph Klover,

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks