Slashdot Mirror
The Year in Scripting Languages
Mitchell writes "People from several language communities came together to create a
joint year-in-review
for Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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?
It does have a large market share, ya know.
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
Not really ports to the platform itself, but great productivity boosters regardless. I've used VisualPython with VS.NET 1.0 and it rocks.
... PHP?
This report shows how it is growing.
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
scripts are for kids!
Script reviews and naked girls.
Or try Pajonet.com
I hope Python integrates wxPython. With Python + wxPython, it can take on things like Java, Mono, and .Net.
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.
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!!!!
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!
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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...
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!
- php - 1.1 million hits
- perl - 56,200 hits
- lua - 478 hits
- python - 27,800
- ruby - 54,400 hits
- tcl - 4,680 hits
And the winner is: PHP by a landslide!--naked
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
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).
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.
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.
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
PHP now has a batch mode intended for preprocessing. That is, periodically generating static HTML from PHP pages.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
"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.
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.
K certainly looks interesting, tho'.
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.
For scripting, there are not equals to Rexx the king of scripting languages.
4 6624
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
14272476927059598810582859694494951363827
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
It's also good to see newer scripting languages like Ferite progressing as well.
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.
> 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
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!
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Here are a few reasons why someone would want to use Tcl:
... while', you could write it in Tcl itself.
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
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/
Why do I still prefer bash? Bummer, you'll have to go RTFM yourself....
C|N>K
"Lua" is Portuguese for "Moon". Lua is a Brazilian project.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
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.
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
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
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
It's available for DOS! 'nuff said. :D
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
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
It even got a mention on Slashdot.
Can Rexx do: :7 055 33607443750388370351051124936122493198378815695858 12759467291755314682518714528569231404359845775746 98574803934567774824230985421074605062371141877954 18215304647498358194126739876755916554394607706291 45711964776865421676604298316526243868372056680693 76 ...but really, how does being able to do this mean that a scripting language 'has no equal'...
...must be pretty tough...
2**1000
1071508607186267320948425049060001810561404811
Or when you say that 'Rexx has no equal' do you mean that you can't check for equality in Rexx?
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.
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.
Answer appeared instantly on my lowly P3-800.
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.
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