Well my feeling on the subject is this: I'm not terribly fond of perl,
it's kind of neat and it does some great things for people, but it's not
my cup of tea.
TCL is pretty cool, it's on just about everthing, you can even do gui
stuff on a lot of machines (not OS/2 yet...) Byte and the other rags are
billing it as a key piece of "agents" and the 411-interstate... I would
definitely keep an eye on it.
Python is really cool in my book. It's just like C, at least to me it
is; and that's a very good thing, C and I have been together ever since
pop bought MS C 2.0 for that ancient XT back in the glory days. Python
picked up really well. It is also well suited for objects, OOP/D is one
of my favorite things and it makes life really easy. There is also a
large number of tools in the library which makes it that much more
attractive. It doesn't have tha fame of TCL, but it's really cool. The
OS/2 support isn't the greatest, but it's not too bad. Pretty good for
prototyping and stuff like that.
Then there is REXX and Java. I've always been bothered by the small
amount of ligt REXX is given, it's a really powerful language for
scripting, complete with new object ready versions and IBM supports it
left and right. Java is Sun's brand new thing that I've been hearing
about everywhere. It sounds like it's going to be big, but only time
will tell...
I could go on... The biggest problem with Perl, TCL, Python, etc. is
that there are so many interpreted languages that are supposed to fit
that "prototyping/batch/scripting" role. They all have a lot of things
in there favor and a lot of them have huge weaknesses (I looked at this
one perl for about half an hour, it was only 30-40 lines and I couldn't
figure out how it was working.) My advice is this, they are all fairly
simple to learn and use; find one you like, use it, if it becomes
obsolete or something learn a new one. If you are starting a project
that is long term and fairly important, I think you might be better off
with a compiler and some good ANSI C++ or Ada or something. If you are
just doing simple/small stuff, then jsut use what you like.
-- Ian S. Nelson <bonovox@cmu.edu> finger for PGP key Carnegie Mellon Computer Science/Math Home Page:http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/usr/in22/ian.html My opinions are not the school's, although they should be!