Programming

Hello all,
i am in a bit of dilema here. i dont know any thing about perl or python. only know a little bit of awk. now unable to take a decission as to which language to go for. my requirement is building a testing framework.suite which will execute ssytem comands remotely on unix nodes and will fetch the results from the system. it also involves a lot of files comparsion. pls help me out. perl or python ?

(Disclaimer: If it seems like I'm favouring Perl here it's because I couldn't code in Python or Ruby if my life depended on it)

Best answer I can give you: it depends. All three languages have their pros and cons, but the weight of each depends on what you want to do, and what you already know.

Perl: evolved out of awk, sed, C, and a few others. The syntax is very relaxed, and the "credo" is There Is More Than One Way To Do It. Libraries are available as "Packages", with a large collection at the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network), and are used via the use keyword.

Python: an (almost) completely object-oriented language. Blocks of code are organized through indentation levels. Syntax is quite strict. Libraries are available as "Modules" and are used via the import keyword.

Ruby: (largely) a mix of Perl and Smalltalk. Syntax is similar to Perl, with the difference that all datatypes are objects, and can have methods invoked on them. Libraries are largely available through the RubyGems application, which is similar to CPAN and apt-get.

My suggestion would be: go through the tutorials for all three languages, and choose the one where the usage best fits the way you think.

I would like to approach it from the opposite direction: if you master regular expressions well enough and know from your architect what the target language is, you are in a much better position to understand how you can implement the requirements. We routinely develop prototypes with regular expressions in Javascript and ask our developers to implement it on the target environment. The language then turns out to be much less of an issue, since the prototype regex can usually be copied with some syntactical modifications.