I am hardly a profesional programmer but from time to time I like to automate my work.
In the past I was learning c++ but it turned out I am just using c. I just do not like the c++ vastness (I want simple set of commands like c has). The biggest issue I have with c is lack of some “standard style”. At first it is nice to “pick one style and be consistent” but when I want to use other people’s libraries and their API is consistent in a different way, it always end up as one pile of garbage.
Since then I learned a little bit of python which I use mostly as a scripting language. I just cannot do a proper software that will not throw an exception at the worst time in the production runtime (why is it not documented in the library? ). I like compiled langages more. On the other hand it is great for “data analysis and exploration” which I do from time to time.
Since I work in a corporate environment I somehow learned vba. And I hate it.
Last I tried was rust - I wanted to know what was the fuzz about. And I must say it is very nice from the compiler to tell me where is the syntax error and how to change it. Well, at least during the beginning. I have not done much so far - most of which could be done in c with little less nagging. I see some benefit over c in some “modern” concepts but memory safety is not one of them (I never had problem with that one in the past anyway).
Hello,
My objective to better myself as a retired basic *nix SysAdmin would be to complete my language skill set to automate stuff, build some basic software tools related to Antenna construction, radio controllers etc …
Assembly (nasm … )
C
??? PERL ???
If you are willing to give a bit of your time and respond to this thread … I would really appreciate the opinion of the professional programmers, free software programmers, hardcore volunteer programmers and sysadmins on PERL
I don’t think I would like the “too” commercial stuff ex: Java, C#, well mostly proprietary products.
I will not go into python, lisp, stuff like that.
(In the past I did (1981- Basic on the ti-99 4a) 2- (2001- SysAdmin small scripting with Korn Shell, Bash shell till today )
To make my post brief: What’s your opinion about PERL for my “hobbyist / user” time spending with free software till I need a walker because of old age
There are few languages on the planet I want to work in less than PERL.
My personal opinion is that it is a dying language. Many of the tasks once performed in PERL are more commonly done in Python or other languages. Unless you already are familiar with PERL, I can’t recommend starting to learn it now unless you want to contribute to an existing code base.
On the other hand, if you like PERL, use what you like and don’t worry about what others think,
I have just played about 5 minutes total in my life time with it but like you said, I realize that we are not in 1998-2000 period of time, when I remember it was installed by default on Solaris … so it’s dying …
I never bothered to properly learn Perl. I was briefly interested in it, because it is a language that was inspired by AWK, another language that I absolutely love, so I thought I might enjoy Perl, too. But the sad fact is, Perl got bloated into much more than it ever needed to be. As a general purpose scripting language, I quickly discovered that it is a real pain to use, and for short one-liners, nothing beats AWK.
For general purpose scripting, Bash is more than enough. AWK is great for line-by-line data manipulation. And for serious programming, where you want to make programs that will last, just use C (or C++ if you don’t mind the extra complexity as a price for more productivity).
I liked this ‘Pathologically Eclectic Report Language’ as Larry Wall called his child. Scripts were ‘portable’ among VMS, Unix and PC-s. It has good documentation. For application and sysadmins it was a quick help to write usable auxiliary tools. Time is sometimes a factor.
It’s a less write-only language than C, but a much lighter category for limited tasks.
Oh, this is a thread where friends and enemies are made.
I’m a software developer by my apprenticeship, which was more than 20 years ago. I learned a 4GL (4th generation language, a marketing term for languages that resemble english) back then, very database-centric, but not like SQL. Since those days, I have learned at least 20 languages that I have been or am fluent in.
I usually appreciate languages that do something consequently that they take out to do. Back in my apprenticeship I learned Perl, because I didn’t want to end up a 4GL developer for life. Perl is the only language that ever made me cry. When I read Larry Walls descriptions on how natural language idiosyncracies led to features in Perl and could see the concepts in the language, I wept, because something like that did not exist in my 4GL, and I didn’t know at that time how much I missed a language that “made sense”.
Regarding Java I see it as this: The best thing about Java is not Java, but the JVM. It is such a great piece of software, many many very intelligent and nerdy people optimized it in a way that rarely any other system can claim. And although I was fluent in Java once, it’s not really my language. Many things are cumbersome or seemingly impossible. I think the age of languages that do not follow the Perl motto “Make easy things easy and hard things possible” has ended.
C is a great language. I think that it still exists while being this old is a testament to how good it is. It has very easy concepts, but complexity of tasks sneaks up on you if you’re not careful. The book “The C Programming Language” is regarded by many developers (we called them coders back in the day) as maybe the greatest development book every written. I do agree.
My current language of choice (of occupation) is SQL. It has the advantage of not making anything too annoying, which is not something many languages can say.
I hate bash or shell programming in general. I hate that there is no good debugging options (that I am aware of, mind you), and I cannot see any world where a shell script is in any way preferable to just jumping into Python or Perl.
Very interesting to read ;
And tanks for sharing about your great years of coding with computing machinery.
I had to work with Oracle 7 briefly on the SCO machines during my course in 2001 in Kingston.
Reminds me of John and it’s colleague with all these "alter database table in … " etc … it was a great time in my life
Thanks for the input on the book “The C Programming Language”, I went upstairs to get it in my book shelf.
Take care,
François
P.S. I would like to thank the people who gave their opinion - this is truly a superb thread to read. And also thanks to the forum owners. I will go silent know, as I really think I’m going to get whooped in the rear for hijacking the thread
Any thoughts on Pascal? I tried Borland turbal pascal years ago and thought it was pretty good. Lazarus IDE is out there but pretty complicated for the beginner. . . . Just my inexperienced opinion.
Pascal has been mostly dead for about 30 years now
It was a common teaching language in the late 80s and early 90s but was not widely used outside of academia. Even Delphi never really gained broad commercial success although it did spike up briefly and there are still some applications built on it.
I’m more on the hobbyist side, so Python is my “go-to”, rather than a fave, I guess. It’s what I’ve done, doing programming on-and-off. Thinking on taking on a course or getting a book to get into a more serious swing of things.
uhh pascal that was before I was born, an antique among programming languages.
Borland C++ compiler is when I started my first steps(18 years ago) in C++. which I find funny two years ago I installed and tried out the C++ compiler from the successor company (Embarcadero), the free version only supports 32 bit. A frog always returns to the pond of its birth
I love reading reading posts like these. Programming languages are so polarizing based on our personal values, and experiences. I wonder if there will be anthropological studies in the future, studying the idiosyncrasies of different languages and how they related to different generations.
I’m an SRE, and long time Linux Engineer. Bash has always been my go-to. I’ve tried to bring Python into the mix but it doesn’t play as nicely. It’s totally operator error, since most of the world is using it this way (it feels like) but I can’t get the hang of it for most tasks.
I recently tried to compare how a few languages handle 100k lines of a CSV and processes the data.
Ruby: 0.890s - 28 Lines of Code
Python: 0.351s - 26 Lines of Code
GoLang: 0.412s - 56 Lines of Code
Bash: 0.423s - 13 Lines of Code.
I’m sure each of these can be improved but as a quick and dirty hands-on in each language it was very fun.
If you’re familiar with Bash and Linux tools then Bash becomes extremely easy to use. Awk/Sed are amazing pieces of work.
There’s definitely a push I feel inside my company and the IT industry in general to go more programmatic in everything you do. Infrastructure as code. So I’m trying to look in that direction.
Python is eating the world but I think overall Ruby is what I will focus on. It’s slow as sin but that .4 seconds difference in runtime, I will save minutes in writing scripts and the cognitive load required to plan my attack. Ruby is human readable, and enjoyable to write.
I love toying in all different kinds of languages. Racket, OCaml and Erlang all have really interesting communities and use cases.
I loved learning Scala, I thought my brain was tearing to shreds but felt empowering. It needed better tooling, I spent a ton trying to get things to work but might be improved by now.
I wish Pascal had a bigger community, it’s pretty fun to use. It’s like VB in the sense of RAD development. You can quickly put together a cross platform GUI app, and I’ve heard its great for making cross platform mobile apps. I think that’s Delphi’s bread and butter.
Excluding it is obviously completely fine, but when I see something like easy text handling and parsing, I would include Perl into the tests, even if you exclude it on principle (there good reasons for that). Perl has been optimized for this very use case for 30 years now, and it is very, very good and fast at it.
@DromundKaas That’s true, I should include Perl. I imagine it’d be pretty good at a task like this, it just totally slipped my mind as another alternative.
Ok, here’s my final, after trying a bit with my books:
Assembly - the flow is similar to prior knowledge ( Top to bottom ) - and hobbyists who like hardware will like it because one thinks in chip to chip electric exchange on the motherboard.
I just do not like the c++ vastness (I want simple set of commands like c has). The biggest issue I have with c is lack of some “standard style”. At first it is nice to “pick one style and be consistent” but when I want to use other people’s libraries and their API is consistent in a different way, it always end up as one pile of garbage.
). I like compiled langages more. On the other hand it is great for “data analysis and exploration” which I do from time to time.
- portable across an environment with many different OS … ok
among programming languages.
wisdom 
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