[plug] Religous war pending

[Cameron Patrick]

Leon Blackwell wrote:

> > Perl or Python?
> 
> As the voice of confusion, I'm going to have to mention PHP and Ruby
> here.

PHP... ewww!  (And what is it with people called Leon liking Ruby?
Maybe it's genetic :-P)

Since we're mentioning other languages, I'll plug Lua here; it's
mainly designed to be an embedded extension language and has an almost
non-existent standard library but it's easy to learn (syntax is even
simpler than Python) and still has most of the high-level programming
language concepts that you'd want to use.  It's also faster than
Python.  Oh, and Brad should like it because it looks like pascal with
all the 'begin' and 'end' blocks ;-)

> Perl is good with text, python is good with numbers.

Perl is indeed good with text, although Python has most of the same
features albeit mostly buried in a library somewhere rather than
included as part of the language proper.

I don't consider Python to be particularly good at number crunching.
It can do it, sure, but it's really quite slow unless you use
specialised libraries like Num Py or Sci Py.  (Unfortunately these
didn't help for the cases which I've considered using Python for
numerical stuff; they're great for performing the same numerical
operation on big arrays of numbers but not so good for algorithms that
can't be reduced to vector or matrix operations.)

What I find Python's strength is as a 'glue' language.  It has good
network support, good modules for building GUIs (PyGTK or PyQT
depending on which way you swing), and copes well with more complex
data structures that would be a pain to implement in C or Awk.

Cameron.