[CentOS] which programming language for server-side admin tasks

David G. Mackay mackay_d at bellsouth.net
Mon Jun 15 19:16:00 UTC 2009


On Mon, 2009-06-15 at 10:04 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > Also, there are several engineers at Red Hat that are very unhappy with
> > the impact that the 3.0 release is going to have on them.
> 
> Yes but it has been obvious for a long time that python does not 
> consider backwards compatibility to be important.  This shouldn't have 
> come as a surprise.  By comparison, perl has been around longer and 

Judging by some of the comments on the fedora-devel list, it did anyway.

> through more changes and yet about the only thing you might have to 
> check on a program written for perl 1.x to run under 5.x would be 
> whether you have @ in double-quoted strings that you wanted to remain 
> literal.

I used to do a lot of coding in perl, but I found that I liked python
better.  I still like python for quick and dirty one-offs, but I'm not
going to use it for large and persistent projects.

> One other consideration is that perl probably has the current advantage 
> in terms of available code library modules.  Pretty much anything you 
> can imagine doing has already been done and contributed to CPAN so often 
> the code you have to write yourself is trivial with the modules doing 
> the bulk of the work.  Java may be catching up in this regard but I 
> don't think there is a central place to find available code.

Google? ;)

I guess the real question is how well java is going to prosper under
Oracle's ownership.  Then again, with openjdk, it might not matter too
much.

Dave





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