On 12/13/2010 12:08 PM, R P Herrold wrote: > As the thread was for a newbie recommendation, I'd really > consider Ruby before any of the others, Yes, Ruby can work for much the same reasons I gave for Perl in my previous post in this thread. I'd say it has a bigger mismatch w.r.t. shell script than Perl does, but it shares the same sensibility and level of complexity. In some effort to keep the thread on topic, some of the languages mentioned so far don't ship with CentOS: C#, Lua, and Pascal, that I saw. The OP didn't say, but I'm assuming part of the goal here is to be able to write programs that will run on any CentOS box without adding third-party software. Here are the languages I found in the main CentOS 5 package repository: - all the other shell dialects: the OP is trying to move past these - Ada: not yet advocated for - assembly: if the OP thought Java too tough, he ain't seen nothin' yet - Awk: not yet advocated for - C and C++: see assembly :) (No flames, please. I write C++ most every day, and have written substantial amounts of pure C.) - Java: DQ'd by the OP - Objective C and Objective C++: not yet advocated for - Perl, Python and Ruby: already well advocated - Tcl: not yet advocated for I'm ignoring special-purpose yet Turing-complete languages like Postscript and bc, as well as those too tightly coupled to a particular platform to be considered general-purpose, like elisp and PHP.