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What Programming Language For Linux Development?
k33l0r writes "Recently I've been thinking about developing (or learning to develop) for Linux. I'm an IT university student but my degree program focuses almost exclusively on Microsoft tools (Visual Studio, C#, ASP.NET, etc.) which is why I would like to expand my repertoire on my own. Personally I'm quite comfortable in a Linux environment, but have never programmed for it. Over the years I've developed a healthy fear of everything Java and I'm not too sure of what I think of Python's use of indentation to delimit blocks. The question that remains is: what language and tools should I be using?"
The *nix API is in C.
Alternatively, you could look at Perl, as well.
If you're really desperate, you could use Mono, but I wouldn't recommend it.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
C/C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, Python, Perl, [insert language of choice]
All can be used to do Linux development.
KDE, stick to C++ and Python.
Gnome, stick to C and C# and Python.
GNUStep, stick to Objective-C
Java and Perl and any other language you choose can be used as well, but the desktop environment support for them is little to non-existent, depending on the language.
Mono could make the transition very easy for you, depending on what your doing.
Light the blue touch-paper and retire immediately.
Do you want to develop KDE apps? How about GTK apps? Do you want to submit kernel patches, or create system utilities?
You may want to be more specific, however - C, C++, Perl and Python are pretty much the norm.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
... it is also pertinent to note here that the GNU standards document, section 3.1: "Which Languages to Use" strongly advises plain old C for both performance and absolute maximum cross-platform compatibility.
Since operating system and hardware platform independence are both key factors of code re-usability and really what open source software is all about I personally think this is a strong call.
However the parent post is correct in that application intent trumps all. If you are just writing shell tools you never intend to use outside of Linux then PERL is likely fast enough and probably much easier/faster (bottom line: cheaper) for the average developer to work with.
If you're writing web software use PHP, but it will make you feel dirty inside.
"We had on average 4 bugs a week due to the indentation bullshit, each of which took multiple hours to debug."
Any chance you could name the company you work for?
Because I want to avoid your products.
Python is absolutely unusable on real world projects (any project where you aren't the sole developer) due to that indentation crap.
Would you mind repeating that? I don't think the guys developing the following projects heard you:
I could go on... but you get the point.
If your software team is having problems with the significance of white spaces in Python, my bet would be that, no offense, the team was to blame.
The trick is to coordinate the "white space rules" between members of the team. If it can't pull that one off, I wouldn't trust them to write code for a production system anyways.
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
Try it. You'll be soon warning people away from it, too. C# programming is one thing (it's just a language), but the mono/.NET libraries will have you banging your head against the desk before long.
I might have a skewed perspective. When I started working with mono, the big selling point was that we could use all the tools and processes on Windows (our development environment is standardized for the whole company's development department and has years of process development work in it), then deploy applications on our Linux servers (we were even using SuSE). Not so fast. Some of the data access libraries work different (tests that pass on .NET fail on mono). Most of those nifty widgets and reporting tools you're using in Visual Studio won't work at all, because they rely on GDI or other native Windows services/APIs.
We eventually abandoned mono (and .NET for that matter, other than existing production applications), and we are now mainly using Java (it is the COBOL of the 21st century, after all). Deployments on our JBoss servers work exactly the same, whether they are on Windows, or Linux, and so far we have not encountered a single bug that we had to work around because the vendor's response was "Yes, that's a known issue and will be fixed in the next commercial release." (!!)
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Python is absolutely unusable on real world projects (any project where you aren't the sole developer) due to that indentation crap.
It's fine if you don't like Python and don't want to use it, but to say that it's completely unusable on real world projects is a bit absurd. And while you may find it hard to read, I think it's obvious because if it looks like code is a block, it is. The main trick to read and follow PEP-8, use a decent editor and write unittests.
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