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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."
Hello, I am the Slashdot Source Code. The answer is Perl. This question is now answered.
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... for a difinitive answer to a subjective question.
where's php?
print "hello world";
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
I think the author is pretty biased away from Java, at least when compared to C#. If you look at the sample code, the class name for C# is always one letter, but for Java it's always spelled out.
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...
Ruby came in second, now lets say i put Ruby on my resume....how much respect will that get? while it was useful to rank the scripts to the author for whatever purpose(prove his point). It is still useless because there is a lack of implentation of 90% of these scripting languages...ergo this changes nothing..my resume is still filled with useless knowledge which won't help me win on jeopardy
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
Perl can do a lot, but nothing is more painful than having to look at a perl source code. While a program can be written semi readable, when compared to some others, like PHP or python, they typically make me want to stick very large needles in my eyes.
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
How about the best language for the task you are trying to accomplish?
I've been using AppleScript for a bunch of stuff lately, but when I hit something that wasn't really intuitive in AppleScript that could easily be done in Perl, then I did it in Perl. Obvious, yesno?
php for real-time multiuser applications on the high level, C for real performance
perl for non-real-time application (unless you're slashdot and have oodles of resources at your disposal, even then, it's still inefficient)
Everything else: you work for Intel, Dell or Kingston
The slashdot descripton mentions that OCaml is the best. ...But when you follow the link, and look at the bottom of the page regarding the first prize winner, This is the proclamation.
It's not OCaml.
C++ was also praised: "C++ is a fine programming tool for many applications."
If you'd like to try scripting with Java, then I suggest looking into Mozilla Rhino, which allows one to script Java via JavaScript.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
I like the ease of PHP and the fact I fully understand it helps. I've wanted to learn Perl, but lack the motivation except to perhaps code some patches for /.
Anyone feel the same way about either PHP or another scripting language? When you fully learn one, is there a need to switch?
Remember, when you have more experience with a scripting language, you can pretty much create anything you'll need at a rapid rate. I think that the level of your knowledge determines the effectiveness of the language.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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.
Me? I'd rather choose my scripting *and* programming language by some other measures, which mainly involve:
- portability
- object model
- ease of writing C/asm extensions (for speed!)
- extension modules available in default installation
I have my own choice (not the winner, it's my *choice* - I haven't compared and/or used other ones mentioned too extensivley). I have as portable interpreter, as Java (except it does work, not only claims that), with much smaller footprint; I can code extensions in C using simple syntax (it's very easy); I have already thousands of available modules in the base installation.I am pretty sure, that other tools, mentioned in the report, also allow pretty much the same, some of them do that better, some of them are worse, some are not worth using (as we seen, network stack can be written in PHP) - that's not the point. In my opinion, that report seems like comparing pneumatic hammers, ordinary hammers, sledgehammers and hamsters (mainly because "hammer" sounds similar to "hamster", so what the heck, let's compare them) - by something like color or shape, not by the things they can do.
You shouldn't compare tools like this (well, except for purely academical purposes), it's not useful at all for me. And, if you want to choose your tools basing on such reports, well then, good luck.
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.
A big part of being a scripting language is being quick to code. But it seldom happens that you can tell how quick it was to code by how many characters it was. For instance for some tasks (even some scripting tasks), IDEs can help you go faster. Proper, clear error messages and exceptions can help you go faster. etc. The scriptometer didn't measure time to code at all, even though it is much more important than what they actually do measure.
Also, the definition of "scripting" is totally biased towards sh-based languages. Which language is best for driving a GUI word processor? Which one is best at scraping data from a web site or web service? Which one can tweak an XML configuration file? Which one can transcode from UTF-16 to UTF-8 quickly? Scripting is not just about files and regex filters.
Of course I probably wouldn't bother to post if my favourite language had won...
The article says the smallest java program is 68 chars long just to make it seem double that of C#
public class smallest { public static void main(String[] args) { } }
But this would be the smallest Java program. only 56 chars
public class A{public static void main(String[] args){}}
(Karma be damned; I am no better than an AC anyway)
But it really does depend. I'd use Perl over Python for web development any day of the week (exception: Zope seems pretty cool, but I've not fooled with it enough. The 'everything is an object' metaphor is heaps cool though :)). Perl is faster to write and more expressive, Python is easier to read and - IMHO - often better structured.
... yeah ... the language itself seems a little hacked together - PHP5 fixes a lot of things, mind you so my opinion might change in a few months time after I've used it a little more.
PHP is great for hacking web stuff together, but
It worries me that a "feature complete" version of PHP instantly becomes a release candidate, rather than stewing in Beta for a while.
I don't see PHP listed. It's possition on the list is arguable, but it certainly belongs there.
...I mean, look at all those clear, concise Brainf**k programs out there.
Seriously, there's something to be said about a programing language that forces good practices (read: python). I indent and comment my code pretty well/consistantly, but a lot of people don't. And while I don't program professionally, I could certainly empathize with people who do debugging Perl code.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm going to stick my neck out and say I like Perl -- so I think this is good news. However, I've always thought of Perl as a text-processing language, and In My Limited Experience, mobile phones can only fit about ten words on the screen. {on the other hand, this could simply lead to phones with bigger screens.}
There's no denying that you can write really ugly code in Perl, but you can also write beautiul code in Perl. I think some of the people who knock Perl are confusing "undisciplined" with "not anal retentive". Perl was always based around the idea of serving the end rather than the means -- it's about where you're at, rather than how you got there. It does not impose a particular style on the programmer. Thus, for any given task, there could be many, many ways to accomplish it in Perl.
They're all right.
Some will be faster than others, some will use fewer resources than others, some will look prettier then others when viewed as source. But if you don't care enough about those things to mention them in the design spec, then they don't matter.
Now, you can have your fancy object-oriented stuff, but in many ways it's overkill. For instance, if you needed to write a programme involving geometry, you could create an Angle object which would have a value assumed to be in radians and properties for its sine, cosine, tangent and representation in degrees; a Distance object which would have properties for its representation in different measuring units; and assigning a value to any property would affect the object and therefore its other properties. It might be beautiful if you like the OO concept, but it's a bit overkill if you just want to find the missing side of a triangle.
And does a "disposable" programme -- one that you will run only a few times before forgetting it forever -- really need to look pretty anyway?
As for PHP, well, it really isn't much different from Perl -- apart from always needing to put brackets around function parameters, the fact that all variables start with a $ sign whether scalar, array or hash and there is no $_. {I happen to love $_. It goes nicely with the concept of an accumulator. If you never did any assembly language, you probably won't know what I'm talking about, though}. That is hardly surprising, because the original PHP was actually written in Perl to be like a kind of subset of Perl.
Also, one of my little niggles -- and I freely admit that this is just my own opinion -- is the inability to get on with any language that uses the plus sign as the string concatenation operator while letting you freely mix string and numberic variables. {*cough* ruby *cough*} I expect "2" + 2 to equal 4, not 22. Hell, if I have to do something to my variables before I can add them, that just nullified the advantage of having freely-mixable scalar types! It might as well be a strict-typed language and barf on an expression such as "2" + 2!
As for Python - well, it's not my cup of tea {I guess you like either Perl or Python} but other people seem to have written some pretty good stuff in it, so I shan't knock it.
under Tools:
compilation and execution in one command (20 points) vs
debugger (5 points)
Ok, mabe it's just me but the author finds it 4x more important to be able to compile and execute the comand than having a debugger of some sort I mean wow if it's that important maby he should write some sort of script to handle that for him.
And wow that's a lot of TD's out there maby under Program Lengths by Language. Then again maby when we find somone who can figure out that the "ease of converting between numbers and strings" is less important than say noticing that your string doe not contain a number. "10l0" is realy the same as "RED" so who cares right.
PS: If you want to compare scripting lanuages try writing somethign that does a grep search for "GET A CLUE" with files of the format USEFULL*INFO## and then sort's the output by the number of ocurances of "FuncoLand" instead of writing hello world is as few chariters as posible.
And it made a good impression in one of my job applications, where the contact person knows it pretty well. It won't impress most people, sure, but (a) people who don't know Ruby will understand that means you could do Python, PHP or Perl; (b) people who do know Ruby will think better of you.
Are you adequate?
(How come <ecode> doesn't preserve whitespace?!)
Not that it makes any difference, Java was never gonna do well and is totally inappropriate for scripting, but there ya go.
--Tim
Measuring program size in bytes is stupid. Lines of code, though still rife with problems, is a much better measure.
Are you adequate?
You know what language does not matter. I can write a preforking server in perl in one line of code. How? Because somebody else has already done it for me, documented the code, posted in a central library that's available for everybody and is searchable. Not only that I can type "perl -MCPAN -e shell" and "install Whatever::Whatnot" and have it in under 5 minutes. Try that with python, ruby, ocaml or java.
Maybe python is easier to read, maybe ruby is more object oriented, maybe ocaml is faster, maybe lisp is better then all of them, but I don't care. When I want to get something done I can always get it done faster in perl and it's all because of CPAN.
Until another language offers what CPAN does I don't care that much about it.
evil is as evil does
There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that Microsoft squashed NN through a number of maneuvers and sort of knocked it out of first place, right or wrong.
Second, when the web needed to grow wings and move beyond static HTML and client-side code started coming into play, you ended up with EMCAScript. Netscape owned the keys. Netscape and Microsoft weren't able to come to terms, so Microsoft reverse-engineered it (why can't we do that with their code?) and put it into play with their browsers. That kept them on par with NN. Next, they needed to find something a little less "C-like" for the non-programmers who were HTML-literate to jump to server-side scripted pages. Visual Basic is easy. Let's castrate it a bit and mold it into a scripted language. That stays in their VB-like world. Granted, they support server-side JScript (a better term than JavaScript as they aren't really running JavaScript), PERLScript (why do people not spell it like an acronym any more?), PHP, and practically anything else which has been ported to run under IIS.
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
I've collected a paycheck, one way or another, in almost twenty-five languages (in almost as many years) - the ability to learn new things quickly comes in handy when it comes when someone's got obscure code which needs to be rewritten, fixed, or updated.
Big Tip: It's not the language. It's the coder. If you know several languages and can apply the best one for a particular language, it's that much easier. If a language is best-suited for libraries, use it for libraries, then use other languages which are better for GUIs to do that and call the libraries as needed. 95% of the people in the industry really don't belong in the industry and their code basically sucks when you get a good look at it. The problem is people like it and think they're good at it. Because there are so many requests and so few people who can fill the slots, no filtering is really needed compared to what should be done. It may appear things are better now than they were twenty years ago, but the bottom line isn't all that different.
The truly sad part is if you grabbed a large quantity of people who code for a living and put them in a room and said, "All of the good coders go to this side and all of the bad ones go to that side." Which side do you think all of them will go to?
"You don't have to be good, just good enough." (and that's not good enough)
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.
Every job has its requirements; being a good programmer is being able to use the tools you have to solve the problem in a way that fits the requirements. Being a great programmer is knowing which tool is right for the job - and which isn't - and when they may have to look for something else.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
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...
First of all, a pure character-based size count seems unfair. I do not believe that the number of characters in a chunk of source code is directly correlated to the amount of time it takes to write. Most of a programmer's time is usually spent thinking, not typing, and you can thinking just as fast with verbose naming conventions as you can with terse ones, as long as the constructs are the same. And then, if the constructs are different, it's even harder to judge, because if the constructs in one language are more natural, corresponding closely to human thought patterns, then coding in that language will tend to be much faster than coding in more cryptic languages, even if the cryptic language requires fewer keypresses.
For example, I tend to find that writing in functional languages is easier for me. My functional-language just tends to come out faster and contain far fewer bugs. I'm not entirely sure why, but I suspect it has something to do with the thought-pattern-correspondence idea I mentioned above.
Second thought... some of these comparisons are clearly unfair. For example, one of the test cases is implementing "grep". The sh version of this case simply calls grep (after validating the arguments, I guess), which seems like a really big cop-out. Any language could just as easily run grep in a separate process. Meanwhile, the OCaml version seems to implement the main loop of grep manually in terms of library functions that are not identical to grep. That is to say, the main thing the OCaml code is doing is translating grep-specific options and semantics to the options and semantics used by its own library functions. To make this comparison fair, one would have to write a library function in OCaml which is identical to grep, then allow that function to be called without counting the library as part of its code.
I think the only fair and useful way to make comparisons like this would be to hold a contest of some sort. Get an expect Perl programmer, an expert Python programmer, etc., together, then give them a program of some sort to implement. Avoid defining the program to be too similar to one language's library calls. In the end, judge the languages both on how fast the contestant completed the code and on how useful and robust the resulting code turns out to be.
Probably not going to happen, of course.
This is cheating; nevertheless it compiles and runs with sun jdk without any problems
class A{static{System.exit(0);}}
Only 32 chars. yay!!
> Interesting that ICFP contests lately pronounced OCaml as the winner for rapid development.
.o absent, invoke grep on some files, etc).
Certainly that is interesting, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the article. "Rapid Development" (or development in general) is not comparable to scripting, and the ICFP contest tasks (which this year was to develop AI code governing ants in a colony) contrast sharply with the sort of scriping tasks in this shootout (compile a file if
[aside]
This is not intended to rag on scripting or scripting languages, just to note that scripting embodies a largely distinct set of tasks from development in general (and a comparison involving OCaml or the ICFP contest is inappropriate). These sort of tasks that historically have been the domain of shell scripting, although perl seems to have taken over a lot of these things.
As a lot of what perl is best at is simplifying things that you could almost do from the unix shell (or might be able to do with a script, but would be a pain in the ass..), it always struck me as logical that perl should evolve toward becoming a viable replacement for the unix shell.
Sadly this doesn't seem to be on the agenda of the perl gods. Instead of evolving to better fill this niche, they seem to be gravitating toward becoming a sort of second-rate Java/Python immitator. I suspect that the underlying technologies they build with Parrot and the Perl 6 redesign will largely fail to convince many folks who aren't already perl users that perl is a useful substrate for developing real systems on top of. At the same time they will have neglected to improve in their original niche of quick and dirty sysadmin hacklets, while other languages will have continued to improve and build momentum.
Then again, I'm quite possibly wrong. We'll see what happens. Should be interesting..
Speaking of web stuff and perl, my (former) boss always said "Perl is great. In fact, if you smash your hands down on the keyboard, you're halfway to having a working web server." Not trolling here, attempting humor.
I never really thought about it before now, but damn, l337-speak can look like exceptionally grotty perl code when it wants to...
Sh is the best at doing tasks common in Sh, whereas languages not designed for shell scripting do them less well than sh. Furthermore, languages that aren't even scripting languages are terrible at being sh.
1p}{ 1 sp34k |33+ +|-|e|\| p30p13 \/\/il| 8e i/\/\pr3553|)
While it does moderately well on this test (finishing near the middle), you might be surprised at it's weak finish compared to it's reputation as a concise language. Well, as a committed Ocaml advocate, Ocaml isn't a scripting language. I freely admit that it has so-so string handling, no built-in regular expressions, so-so process handling, etc. But this is because it isn't a scripting language- it's an applications language, like C++, Java, and C#. And the only reason it does as well as it does is because it's a signifigantly better language than it's competition.
If you're writting a quick script to grep through the log files looking for port scanners, Ocaml is the wrong language.
Brian
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.
.*? = snag all chars in non-greedy mode
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.
So perl regexps are cryptic and hard to read even if you know regexps already. Thank you.
Are you adequate?
The measure that the comparison is applying is the size of the source code in bytes. If we're talking about the size of the executable, (e.g. bytecode in Java, C# or Python), bytes is the natural measure.
Are you adequate?
WHy compare with Java when there is Groovy, the JVM scripting language?
Here's a simple sample script:
#!/usr/bin/env groovy
println("Hello world")
for (a in this.args) {
println("Argument: " + a)
}
Note that you can run this from a command line, no compiling required.
Groovy is not just some random basement project either, it's actually a JSR and so will probably become a standard before too long.
If you want a C3 equivilent, I'm sure some well-meaning but mistaken soul will copy this project as they have tried to do with every other Java project. "C# - only a year behind Java since 2003!".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The BeanShell lets you use pure Java as a scripting language and it's almost trivial to include the BeanShell in your Java application.
See http://www.beanshell.org/.
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.
What's your point? The program is shorter shorter when written in sh, more natural and more readable. (Not to mention that it uses lazy evaluation, so that the full input doesn't need to be in memory, just the full list of words).
HAND.
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).
As much as I love programming language comparo's, this one just doesn't hit the spot. Do people actually think a scripting language should only be used for tiny write-only stand-alone scripts? TOOLS: If this section was meant to cover the tools / features that enhance the versatility and convenience of a language, it isn't complete. What about machine code compiler availability / VM support, Web options (CGI, Apache plug-in, Server Pages, etc), editor / IDE support, profiling, RAD features like unit testing, and docstrings, multiplatform support for threading and other features that immature languages might leave POSIX-centered, etc? License openness and multiplatform range should also be considered. And why is shebang awareness, working without which would just require one extra word on the command line, three times more important than an interactive interpreter, debugger, or passing program in command line, which open up some serious time-saving habits. SPEED: Unlike compiled / system programming languages, interpreted speed isn't the most important feature of a higher-level / scripting language. For most tasks on a modern computer, development time is infinitely more precious than execution time. Algorithms matter more than the overhead language speed. For example, since many scripts spend much of their time waiting for file I/O, network response, or user input, a Perl programmer who understands multithreading might end up writing faster apps than a C programmer who doesn't. Another important point is how a language fits into a large modular system. For example, Tcl is easier to embed / extend with C than many of the languages compared, so the real-world apps that are implemented in a combination of C/C++ and Tcl can be optimized as much as is needed. Python has superior profiling, JIT machine code compilation, and VM (IronPython, Jython) implementation than most / all of those scripting languages. Final speed note: the Python version 2.2 used in those benchmarks is ~30% slower than the latest version. L.O.C. COUNT: Program briefness shouldn't be the only measurement of sample code: productivity and readability are each at least equally as important. Like, even though Perl is more compact, I'd bet those sample Python scripts would take less time programmers to write, and far less time to read for a non-Perl-centered programmer. The benchmark should also define a common policy for abbreviation-vs-readability in sample code: many of those examples could be made briefer or more readable regardless of the language. The comparison was missing a number of essential sections: LANGUAGE QUALITIES: how the fundamental language features impact its abilities as a scripting language. This would include language agility, dynamic typing system, garbage collection, high-level non-scalar objects (arrays, hashes, tables, relational features, etc), OO / multi-paradigm abilities, etc. How easy is the language to learn? (Will your non-programmer users be able to make trivial changes themselves?) Does it have any unavoidable annoyances (ex. as much as I love Python's use of whitespace, lack of an alternative block syntax would be a minus here). SCALABILITY: Can it be used for very large applications? Does it break if running more than X instances / threads / CGI hits / etc at the same time? Does it break when asked to allocate 20 gigs of memory for some fancy chemistry simulation with lots of large numbers? AVAILABILITY: How frequently is a language available on a typical shared Web host? How many add-on packages / libraries are available? Does it have any gaps in its library offerings: well-rounded RDBMS support, GUI, regex, multithreading, etc. How easy is it to find related published books, online tutorials / references, and community help? Is there a quality-assured version (like ActiveState), without which a language may not be usable in some commercial situations? Are there many popular / killer-app projects that use the language (ex. Zope). Finally, the comparison was missing PHP, which has full
What ever happened to the engineer's motto "The right tool for the right job"? I'm not a scripts person, but indubitably, all scripting languages have their specific advantages for specific applications. Imho, this whole thing is made for trolling and flaiming and not for anything else. It's just stupid.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
I searched around a bit, and found that someone's already done it. It uses the PCRE library along with a camlp4 macro that provides an elegant "match ____ with" construct tailored specifically to regexps. I'm impressed.
the "correct" answer is easy: the one you know best.
Unless you have other considerations like maintainability, reuse by coworkers, etc. But those considerations are external to any language you might choose.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
Measuring program size in bytes is stupid. Lines of code, though still rife with problems, is a much better measure.
Where program size counts in a scripting language is the time taken to write the program. As someone said recently, "typing is cheap, thinking is expensive". For me it requires 0 seconds of thought and 0.8 seconds of typing to write "import os" in Python if I use something from the os module.
Likewise, using things like regexps from a library necessarily implies some typing (function re.search instead of m//), it doesn't require any thought so the path chosen doesn't impact production time. It does impact the readability which counts too.
I think the referenced "shootout" was a poor idea. Measure things that don't matter, and pretend that they do. A better idea was what was done a while back - measure the size of gzipped source code, which measures the semantic complexity of the code . Python kicked other languages' arses there.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I love the debugger of ocaml. You can backstep, you UNDO the execution of the previous 1, 10, 100, 1000, ... steps.
Wonderful if you like me fill the code with asserts. If an assert occurs, just run in the debugger, then backstep until you know why the unthinkable happened and then you fix the bug.
In a sense you're right in that readability is more important than saving as many charachters as possible when typing. Code is typically read a lot more than written, so readability and hence maintainability are certainly very important.
However, verbosity can also hurt readability. If the syntax contains too much clutter, you have to concentrate on understanding what all the clutter does, and thus you can't focus as much on what the code is actually supposed to do.
As an example, take the typical scripting task of reading a text file line by line, and do something with the line. Code in python is like:
for line in file("filename"):
do_something(line)
Compare this with the abomination that is file i/o manipulation in Java.
Personally I think that's a better metric than the author's simple-minded "the program in this language was eight characters shorter so it gets a higher score". This was apparently an attempt to measure the expressive power of a language, but done in such a way as to ensure Perl scored well.
I think there are more important things to keep in mind when selecting a scripting language, like
- how easy is it to learn?
- how easy is it to remember how to use everything?
- how easy is it to read other people's programs
- how easy is it to read your own code six months from now?
On these counts Perl loses big time. Its "every combination of punctuation characters does something" language design saves you typing, at the expense of pretty much everything else.If the only thing you use the scripting language for was one-off half-page scripts that you use once then throw away, and you wrote those eight hours a day five days a week, then I could see using Perl. For any other purpose I think you're better off using something else. (And, yes, I have a suggestion in mind, and it rhymes with Crython.)
larry
p.s. I have a nomination for a shorter Python program to remove #-characters from a file:
After all, it is precisely as "legal" for the Python program to call sed as it is for the sh program to call sed.There are some silly mistakes in this article, suggesting that the author does not really understand the languages he is comparing.
Here are some examples:
for 'return exit code error (non zero) if a file does not exist' and 'return exit code error (non zero) if a file is not readable. There is no Java or C# code supplied. Java can easily test this: for example
new File(filePath).canRead();
and
new File(filePath).exists();
and I'm sure C# can as well.
There are other omissions:
Under Java 1.5, the System.getenv() method allows access to environment variables.
Also, saying Java is completely unusable in a scripting environment is nonsense. The BeanShell system has been around for years, and allows java to be run as if it were a scripting language, both from a command prompt or from script files. Java 'scriptlets' on JSP web pages are very common. Finally, there is a PHP/Java interface.
I don't know C# well, but I'm sure there are similar facilities for that language.
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
What a silly way to try and display 'objectiveness'.
I get the strong feeling some Perl freaks were involved in the evaluation tables design.
Where's readability?
Could it be that readability contradicts with 'programm shortness'?
Ever tried to read through the shortest possible Perl solution to a problem? Exchange shortness for readability and Python will porbably 'win' hands down.
And what silly dork drew the line between 'scripting languages' and 'programm languages' ?? With 'Java not being a scripting language' and Python, Perl and Ruby being one. Whatever that's supposed to mean.
Why this evaluitation may be objective on some narrow areas, in a whole it's somewhat pointless. I can add some other criteria that will have TCL or bash win in no time.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
OK, here it is:
#!/bin/sh
0 875&cid=9411049
:; do read a || exit; [ "${a/$1/}" == "$a" ] || echo $a; done
# 2004-06-13T12:33:55+0000
# pth shgrep - a minimal shell grep implementation
# Copyright (C) 2004 Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
# http://developers.slashdot.org/~Pan%20T.%20Hose/
# http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
# Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
[ a$1 == a ] && echo "Usage: $0 pattern < file" && exit 1
while
Just a quick hack I wrote right now in less than a minute, I am sure one could write it better. A quick test:
pth@ws0:43:~/sh/shgrep$ ./shgrep arse < /usr/share/dict/words
arsehole
arseholes
arsenal
arsenals
arsenate
arsenic
arsenide
[...]
Seems to work fine. Is it pure enough?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Youdon'treallyexpectsomeoneactuallyreadingthatpost ,doyou?
One of the down sides to the advancement of the free "as in everything" OSs is that people are learning lots of perl and python and such but not learning shell. Whether you are a developer, sysadmin, user or tinkerer you should learn shell first and always add it to the list of tools to evaluate for any situation that comes up.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Nice to see a monk out here in the wilds! BTW, chromatic, did you look at the code for the Perl tests on the article? They're a little... weird. It looks like his shell took a pass at interpolating the command line before he pasted it into the page, or something.
:\
I suppose the fact that he includes "perl -le " at the start of so many "tests" isn't really fair either -- most of those interpreters support similar one-liner options, but they got away with just the program code.
Another problem is that there is very little punctuation that gives your eye any aid in seeing structure. Very often you get a bunch of keywords and identifiers in a row with no delimeters at all! A simple example of this from the tutorial:
let cos2 = compose square cos;;
Come on, cut me some slack! Is this compose(square(cos)) or (compose(square))(cos) or compose(square,cos)? I shouldn't have to think about precedence rules when I'm reading a function call, the syntax should make it clear what's going on! Another example:Compare this with a Python-like syntax:I don't know about you, but to me the second example is a lot more readable. Readability is about making your eye see the structure without even trying. That's one of the reasons I like Python so much: I think it excels at making the structure unavoidably apparent.
Ocaml's definitely got some cool things going on, and I really respect the fact that smart people seem to gravitate towards it and get useful things done with it. If I ever learn it, I'm going to have to suck it up and deal with syntax I really don't like.
$ sml ../compiler/TopLevel/interact/evalloop.sml:52.48-5 2.56
../compiler/TopLevel/interact/evalloop.sml:35.55
Standard ML of New Jersey v110.42 [FLINT v1.5], October 16, 2002
- 1 + 1; (* Add two ints *)
val it = 2 : int
- 1.0 + 1.0; (* Add two floats *)
val it = 2.0 : real
- 1 + 1.0; (* Error! *)
stdIn:5.1-5.8 Error: operator and operand don't agree [literal]
operator domain: int * int
operand: int * real
in expression:
1 + 1.0
uncaught exception Error
raised at:
- fun f x y = x + y; (* Define a function *)
val f = fn : int -> int -> int
- fun f x y = f (x-1) y; (* Define a recursive function *)
val f = fn : int -> 'a -> 'b
Are you adequate?
Beanshell is not Java, so your point is moot..
I would argue that this is not true. You can type in and execute Java code into the BeanShell prompt and it will execute interactively. BeanShell itself is written 100% in Java.
You may say its not Java because its not a part of the standard Java APIs, but there are plenty of other scripting extensions to Java that are: Java scriptlets in JSP pages; the Java Standard Tag Library in JSP pages.
I can complete most string manipulation tasks in Perl in 5 lines as compared to over 100 in Java.
Yes, Perl is a very consise language that is superb for scripting. For string manipulation and many other tasks it's unbeatable.
Java is simply not suitable in a scripting environment.
That was not the point that was being made. The article said 'Java was completely unusable in a scripting environment'. This not true. Perhaps the most widely used example is JSP, the java equivalent to PHP and ASP. You can open up a JSP page, type in Java code, and have that page run immediately as part of a live web application. As with PHP you can add and edit pages containing code without shutting anything down. As far as the developer is concerned there is no compile-edit-run cycle. If that is not scripting, what is?
It's faster than bejeepers. I run it on my webhost as a scripting language.
Simple, fast, elegant.
http://www.newlisp.org/
I've done both Microsoft coding from back in the day (Win32 API through COM and ASP) and Linux with perl, c, php... and both platforms with Java
Recently I took a job with a company implementing Microsoft DRM, and selected C# for the new toolsets.
It was a good choice for Microsoft technologies... basically they took the old Win32 API, and wrote wrapper classes to babysit their crappy code underneith (something I used to do in C++) and it works exceptionally well.
And I ASP.Net WebMatrix is a good enough free tool to do effective development (if you don't mind command line compiles or just sticking with C# asp.net pages) if you don't want to spend the cash on VisualStudio.
What about Beanshell! It is a scripting language for Java-based applications like jEdit. Beanshell will interpret ordinary java source files in addition to class files. You can even write a simple web browser in less than 74 lines of code! It surely should have been considered along if languages such as Pike, Lua, and Haskell were thought of.
This entire analysis seems suspect. Take the first section. For JavaScript, their implementation uses NJS, which hasn't even stabilized with a 1.0 release yet! They also have a unix bias: many applications have no need of the shebang, #!. Even though, a script in another language could easily be written to implement that feature. Shebang support is a trivial and doesn't deserve the 15points awarded. Furthermore, awarding points for "program(s) can be passed on command line" is silly. That is a horrible horrible style of coding guaranteed to make scripts hard to maintain.
Their second section is not complet and has a heavy bias against Java and C#. The subsections, "smallest" and "hello world," are silly. I never understood why having a small size for the simplest program is important for nontrivial applications. (For that matter, I never understood why programmers wish for the "least typing" in a language. I never never never code for least typing, since that often makes programs unreadable!) Finally, their coding style is inconsistent. For instance, they use for Java:
Yet the authors throw these conventions out with JavaScript:
(Also note that the numbers reported and counted don't match, but I may just be missing something.) Why? Java and C# seem destine to loose with the author's methods. As I said, this entire report seems biased and unscientific.
P.S. /. needs to fix the site's source code white-space style. This is getting ridiculous.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
find -name "*.c" | sed 's/.c$/.o/;' | xargs echo all: | make -f-
(this is because GNU make is smart enough to figure out how to make
Perhaps the "sh" implementation could assume that there's a perl implementation with shebang in a file called "x" in the same directory and make every "sh script" as 'x "$@"'? That would be really effective scripting language! :-)
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
I overlooked that bit. But I didn't notice any bashisms in their code, and it's rather surprising how many bashless systems I've had to deploy existing scripts on (requiring some porting in many cases).
This is hardly an argument against Bash--now is it? Even despite the obvious lack of omnipresence of Bash, I would bet it is still much more popular than Merd, Lua, OCalm or even Haskell which were also evaluated in the article.
I have seen more perlless than bashless systems myself. I have seen lots of systems with Perl 4 (there are still new systems shipped with Perl 5.005 (sic!) today which is so 1998) but I would not consider using only Perl 4 syntax in the Scriptometer test because of that.
Nevertheless, having done it myself too many times, I can perfectly understand your pain in porting shell scripts. As Larry Wall once said, "it's easier to port a shell than a shell script."
Actually, I don't know of many systems to which Bash has not yet been ported. The systems with Bash I know of are GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, BSD/OS, BeOS, Sun Solaris, IBM's AIX, SGI, HP-UX, Compaq's Tru64 Unix, Jaguar/MacOS X--just from the top of my head. I would consider it a very strong argument pro Bash.
To be honest, I don't know what would you expect from a Bash script grepping text file in the linked article. Running an external grep is apparently not good enough even though running external programs is essentially what shells are supposed to do... Fair enough, so I have written a pure Bash script, which in turn is still not good enough since it is a Bash script... Well, I rest my case.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
You're thinking wrong about it-- conceptually, all functions take a single argument. Well, ok, you can get away with thinking of functions as having multiple arguments most of the time; but the point of the design is that you can apply functions partially:
I guess that would partially explain why it isn't notated compose(square, cos), because although that's the net effect it isn't actually evaluated that way.A further confusion is that it's possible to write functions like this:
The thing is that (2,3) is a single value-- a tuple of two ints (int * int)-- and g is a function from tuples of ints to ints. Tuples don't support partial evaluation like curried functions, but you can pattern match over their contents...Are you adequate?
.... to read Chinese is a real fucking peace of sugary cake.
Well, Duh!
Perlmongers believe that everybody is fluent in Chinese.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.