Hi Brandon,
On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 01:53, Brandon McCaig <bamcc...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 10:08 AM, Raymond Wan <r....@aist.go.jp> wrote: > I never said it was. ;) C still has very many important roles and I > wouldn't have it any other way. xD There were a lot of other people in > college that were terrified of C++ though (probably the majority of > the class), even before we were introduced to the classes and > inheritance and polymorphism, etc (so it was basically C). :P Well, students terrified of C++ are usually that way because it is their first exposure to programming. If you use templates, the pages of error messages for one typo is enough to make most students throw their keyboards out the window... Even now, I need to restrain myself -- can't sacrifice too many keyboards! ... > run fast and less time is wasted that way. Perl's main strength seems > to be text processing. In that sense, it's obviously an improvement on > C. xD However, it does run considerably slower, which does matter for ... All true. So, the question comes down to what people want to do and not which language is best. Not everyone wants to process text, such as what you would see in an Apache log file. In fact, the impact of Perl on bioinformatics has been stated many times by others on this list; yet not all bioinformatics is DNA sequence data so to generalize that Perl is good for bioinformatics is perhaps not correct, either. >> Brandon again (sorry, maybe should have written two replies) -- I was >> going to avoid this thread but while working today, I was reading >> another program's documentation and they gave a script to run their >> program in Python. That's when I realized that the recent program >> documentations I've seen make more references to Python than any other >> scripting language. I don't know why. > > Python is a popular language, but so is Perl. It makes sense that > you'll encounter both. Often, I think that we don't even realize when > we're running one or another. Our system doesn't need us to know what Yes, you are right. But all I meant in what I said is that the wrapper programs distributed with the software tools that I've looked at (let's say, the last 4-5) have all [for some reason] chosen to use Python. Of course, this isn't a random sample and it's not even a large sample at that -- just an observation I realized when coming across this thread. As I don't know Python (and Ruby), it's not like I'm happy with that. :-) > To see if that program is a script, and which language it is. Matter > of fact, I'm getting an evil idea: > > [bamcc...@krypton ~]$ perl=0 python=0 ruby=0; \ >> \ >> for f in /bin/* /usr/bin/*; do >> for l in perl python ruby; do >> file $f 2>/dev/null | grep -i $l &>/dev/null && ((`echo $l`++)); >> done; >> done ; echo "Perl: $perl Python: $python Ruby: $ruby"; > Perl: 156 Python: 94 Ruby: 5 ... > think it's fair to say that Perl isn't going anywhere. :P I would be > more interested in the results of that command-line on a fresh Linux > distro install (without customizing the packages at all). It might > even be fun to compare the results from Fedora, Debian, and Gentoo. > \o/ Actually, I found this to be a very good idea. I think I can contribute some numbers and I have access to a couple of Debian versions. All different computers and all for different purposes (so they will have different software installed) and the older ones are used much less...but a fun thing to look at. Debian 3.1 [2005]: Perl: 153 Python: 13 Ruby: 8 Debian 4.0 [2007]: Perl: 173 Python: 17 Ruby: 13 Debian 5.0.7 [2009]: Perl: 121 Python: 28 Ruby: 0 Debian 6.0 [testing -- 2011?]: Perl: 342 Python: 166 Ruby: 14 So, like what you reported, Perl is definitely more popular in terms of system tools. Python is catching up. Actually, very quickly IMHO in the last 2 years. Ruby's at a distant third. This of course doesn't contradict what I said earlier; the 4-5 software weren't system tools and weren't part of Debian. In fact, they were just program wrappers, which honestly I would think bash would be more suited...but guess that's changing? Ray -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
