On Wednesday 29 October 2008 00:17:50 Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote:
> * Before you ask "what, you don't know C?",
A sysadmin doesn't need to know C. It helps to be able to read it of course.
A sysadmin ought to know grep, sed and awk rather well and be quite fluent in
either perl or python, simply becuase those are tools they will use every day
> I mean to really know C,
> that is, read a rigorous book such as "C: A Reference Manual" and be
> able to write portable programs with well-defined behavior. Speaking
> of well-defined behavior, do you know what happens when you cast a
> float to an int, and the float is too big to fit into the int?
Did oyu try it yourself and see?
> ** I know basic Python, but I think Python is nice enough for a person
> to *really* know it.
Agreed. It's a very nice language and has some nice side effects on your
thinking. Like realising that the "new" keyword is an OOP language is always
completely redundant. Or how many brain cycles you use parsing { and }.
Many people like to bitch about Python's enforcement of coding style. But we
all agree that indentation is good. We disagree sometimes how exactly to do
it. Python assumes that you start using the style you like and simply
enforces that you carry on with it (which you were going to do anyway....)
That appeals to me - cut to the chase, toss out the irrelevant crap and
concentrate on what's left - the important stuff
--
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
