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Searching for the Best Scripting Language
prostoalex writes "Folks at the Scriptometer conducted a practical survey of which scripting language is the best. While question like that is bound to generate flamewars between the usual Perl vs PHP, Python vs Perl, VBScript vs everything crowds, the Scriptometer survey is practical: if I have to write a script, I have to write it fast, it has to be small (less typing), it should allow me to either debug itself via a debugger or just verbose output mode. sh, Perl and Ruby won the competition, and with the difference of 1-2 points they were essentially tied for first place. Smalltalk, tcc, C# and Java are the last ones, with Java being completely unusable in scripting environment (part of that could be the fact that neither Java nor C# are scripting languages). See the 'Hello world' examples and the smallest code examples. Interesting that ICFP contests lately pronounced OCaml as the winner for rapid development."
Two languages missing are:
Io, which is an awesome, prototype-based scripting language that's super-easy to embed in C applications, and has an incredibly simple and consistent syntax.
REXX (Regina's just one implementation). REXX makes it incredibly easy to do system scripting, with powerful string-manipulation and I/O redirection.
Another one's ficl, which is basically an embedable Forth interpreter. (To all you young geeks out there - LEARN FORTH. You may never need to write a line of it ever in your life, but you'll learn a hell of a lot about how computers work. Trust me on this.)
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
The flip side is that before becoming productive one has to get used to a whole new way of thinking about problems: immutable data, everything is a function evaluation, no sequential statements, no side-effects, rely on recursion as much as possible, especially tail-recursion. But ocaml isn't religious about it: it has imperative features, including for and while loops, sequential statements (essentially successive function calls with side-effects and null output), and so on. After a while, though, you find you hardly need any of that. Maybe it's just me, but the sort of work I do is well suited to the functional approach. Also, it has a rich set of data structures and is pretty much agnostic about them: you can use linked lists, hashes, mutable arrays or records, sets, whatever suits your purposes.
The other drawback is the libraries (modules) aren't as complete as the Perl and Python equivalents (though far ahead of most other competition). I imagine that will get cured with time.
One-letter class names? Is he nuts? That guy never had to maintain code I guess...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I don't see PHP listed. It's possition on the list is arguable, but it certainly belongs there.
Most copies of PHP use the equivalent of mod_perl -- i.e. they cache the compilation. Use mod_perl, cache your compilations, and you will find performance is as good if not better than PHP.
Check out my site for some Ruby GUI stuff:
:-)
(the gotcha is it's mostly in Portuguese. So jump to the "Exemplos Meus" (My Examples) section. Or use babelfish: http://babelfish.altavista.com)
http://geocities.com/canalruby
Hey, web stuff is easy with Ruby as well. But I don't have such examples for you. You have to get a taste of Ruby to find about its web capabilities. I Know IOWA has an example:
http://enigo.com/projects/iowa/index.html
Further enlightening at:
http://www.ruby-doc.com
http://www.rubyforge.org
http://raa.ruby-lang.org
You know, once you get addicted, there is no going back!
It never was an acronym. See an explanation of Perl's name for an explanation of the backronym.
how to invest, a novice's guide
now lets say i put Ruby on my resume....how much respect will that get?
I just hired my replacement for a contract I was doing (I accepted another offer that was more in line with my field). One of the requirements was that the person hired would have to know Ruby because much of the code base was in Ruby. They hired someone from our local Ruby User's Group.
So to answer your question: for this particular job if you didn't have Ruby on your resume it wouldn't get a second look. If you had Ruby on your resume, but it became apparent in the interview that you didn't know Ruby... well, the interview was over.
Forth? No.
Learning forth will help you learn reverse polish notation, one specific trick for building high-performance interpreted languages and a very lightweight, easily extensible and embeddable scripting language.
It won't, though, teach you anything about computers work beyond the small amount you'll pick up by learning any new language. Including French.
If you want to learn how computers work there are far better things to play with. Assembly language, obviously, whether it be a synthetic assembly language such as DLX or a real architecture. x86 isn't the most enlightening assembly language to start with (6502 is excellent, MIPS or for a really nice architecture, Alpha) but it'll run on your PC.
Books. Patterson and Hennesey, Computer Organization and Design, The Hardware/Software Interface is pretty good for a programmers intro, but Hennesey and Patterson, Computer Architecture, A Quantative Approach will teach you a lot more, as will most texts with Superscalar in the title
Learn a hardware description language. Verilog is better, but VHDL is OK. Compilers and simulators are freely available for both.
Get an FPGA development kit. Compile yourself some hardware. You can put full CPUs on a fairly cheap FPGA development board.
Design your own CPU. It's possible for an individual or a small group to design a CPU and have it fabricated as a tinychip. I've seen individuals design a full, if tiny, CPU at mask level in a couple of months, and a small group put together a fairly decent gate level design in a few more. Commonly done as part of a college course, but an individual can have a tinychip fabricated for around $1000. Not cheap, but cheaper than some hobbies.
You can do full circuit level design and simulate it using either gate level or spice transistor level simulators and see just why addition or multiplication takes as long as it does.
As a general rule I've found that some of the best software engineers have some hardware design background, and a good understanding of computer architecture, so even if you never plan to do any hardware design, understanding how it all works is a good idea.
Of course, I've also found that a large fraction of good software engineers have also spent time working as theatre technicians, so who knows what the correlations are...
In a similar vain, I wrote up a scripting language comparison document, but focused more on features rather than particular languages. Comparison Link. I describe the various feature options, and then weigh the pro's and con's of each.
After years of debating language features, I generally conclude that a lot of it is subjective. No language will ever satisfy everybody.
Table-ized A.I.
nothing in the OS was ever really meant to be scriptable
That's not really true. Most OS functions are available through COM interfaces. VBScript and JScript interact with any COM interface through the Windows Scripting Host, either in a windowed enviornment (wscript) or a command line environment (cscript). You can manage users, files, ACLs, the registry, network configurations, IIS, application deployment (MSI), multimedia, services, etc. And's it's all done with a nice component paradigm of methods, collections, and properties. Those same COM interfaces are also available for application development to VB6 (native), C++ and .NET.
We've had this COM environment for 10 years with Windows. In my opinion it's more powerful than the "everything's a pipe" approach.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
You're assuming 'limit' is less than or equal to 256 without checking. You're assuming that x, y, and z are set to nulls. You're not handling regional text (i.e. accented alphabetics) or unicode. You also haven't accounted for the fact that the Perl code returns the three bracketed sections of the match in variables.
You may not be aware of this, but the article you linked to is a copy of this one. In the interest of giving credit where it's due, you might want to give Wikipedia more exposure in the future.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
My friend Salvatore and I did a similar site, although we haven't added so many languages and tests, and are more focused on benchmarking. It's available at: scutigena.sf.net
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
If you bothered to read the article...
The lines of code needed to achieve a task are measured, as they serve as an indicator on how fast one can create a script.
If you need 20 lines of C# to check if a file exists, but only one in Perl, then according to the study, Perl should receive a better weighted score for ease of implementation.
Read the articles people! They are interesting (at least most of the time).
Before you cough on Ruby and said "2" + 2 in Ruby will equal 4, have you even tried it? Ruby (and Python) are _strongly-typed_ languages, unlike Perl (and PHP) which are weakly-typed. Ruby protects you from mixing string and numbers in operations like +. You'll have to say "2".to_i + 2.
And having used all four of those for projects large and small, I can say with confidence that I prefer strongly typed language. Weakly typed language is more dangerous and error-prone.
But they probably would want it at least in the language, so it would be:
:)
<? print "Hello World" ?>
or
<? echo "Hello World" ?>
They probably should have included it, but that would add quite a few other "web" scripting languages, as long as they have a way to run them locally. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking ColdFusion, I'm sure there are more.
I think a fun game would be to find the longest way to print "Hello World", without unnecessary filler functions or comments. My first attempt would be to have the Base64 encoded string as a variable, then decode it, then print it, and have all that in an encoded eval.
I found a script someone had that did their "protection" that way. Without the registration key, you couldn't run it, and they had this beautiful set of encoded strings in evals that did the checking. Took me a good 20 minutes to figure the whole thing out. Then I rewrote that part, so I could try the software without a working key.
The software was otherwise crap, except for all the work they had put into requiring the key. I tried it, and proceeded to delete it. It would have been nice if they had a shareware version to try first. I'm really glad I didn't spend the $200 they wanted for it.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
When a program says "shift;", I can't just look up "shift" in the perl manual somewhere,
You mean, "perldoc -f shift"? wow that was hard!
I have to already know about how @_ works in order to understand what the program is doing.
That's just fairly basic Perl.
Both are untrue. TCL will happily take command line arguments, and if you set the execute bit under unix, will happily act as programs. If by "programs can be passed over the command line" that he wants to bang out to the shell, there is the exec command. Of course in his hello world program he uses BOTH features.
TCL gives you a complete stack dump on every error that is stored in a global variable "lastError", and you can override the background error with the bgError command. That also covers the "FullInterpreter in Debugger". The language was designed AS a debugger to C programs for christ's sake.
All told that cost TCL 15 points.
Sure I'm quibbling, but if you aren't going to compentantly seek out features save in all your favorites, you look like an idiot putting these comparisons together.
(Disclosure: TCL Guru.)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
How about Regexp::English in Perl 5 or Perl6::Rules in Perls 5 and 6?
how to invest, a novice's guide
The interesting conclusions are:
I know it probably doesn't matter to most of you, but even lisp has something like CPAN. Its called ASDF, and there is a library called ASDF-Install. Of course common lisp lacks the huge number of libraries that more popular languages have, but (I have to admit) its getting better (getting better all the time).
ASDF on cliki