I'm sure this has been asked before...but I looked at posts from the past few months and didn't see anything recent. I'm looking for a good scripting language to learn. My experience is mostly in VB, with some Javascript and REXX. I've read about Python, Perl and Tcl. They all seem to be quite capable. I'm curious to know what people are using, what they would recommend, and why. Thanks for your input!

I find PHP gives me the most bang for my buck. It's great for web development.

hi,
well I started with c. After a wile I wanted to use CGI (you know: own guestbook and so on....!)
so I learned perl. there is not really a big difference between c and perl (perl was developed out of c, I think!).
But as I started do a little more komplicated stuff (online voting,...) I wanted to use MySQL.
As I found out how to get access to mysql from perl and saw how my buddy did it much easier in python......


I leraned python, and I love it!!
I think it's best of all!!
but everyone preferres something else....!
your choice!

cu lars.

I use different scripting langauges depending on what I'm doing.

For web stuff I use PHP.
For file processing I use Perl
For simple stuff I'll use bash
For IRC scripts I use python (but only becuase Perl is broken in XChat on Debian/unstable)

irc scripts?????
what is that???


cu lars.

A script that performs functions on an IRC server, in my case they usually run within xchat (the irc client I use).

Intro to IRC including "What Is IRC?"
http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/new2irc.html

If ever there was a testimonial to "one-size-DOESNT-fit-all", it's Linux - if you take the average distro and install a reasonable number of apps and system components, you'll find that between them just about all the major scripting languages have been used.

Your background is with the more "English-like" languages, so you might try Python or Tcl. I work in more of a C++ environment, so I tend to use Perl or even Java.

And while Rexx isn't all that common under Linux, if you like Rexx, why not build on it: http://users.comlab.ox.ac.uk/ian.collier/Rexx/ ?

Besides, *IBM* likes Rexx, and IBM likes Linux. Colishaw has been doing some interesting things in the last few years that take the Rexx core concepts to places that most people wouldn't have even considered.

Of course the "ultimate" scripting language is shell scripting if you want to become pompous and obese in the ways of Unix guruhood. All joking aside, the batch language of DOS is pretty feeble compared to a system where you can find who's eating up your disk space with:

du -ak | grep '.java$' | sort -n | tail -n 15

That lists the 15 biggest files in your directories that end in '.java' displayed in kilobytes. And that's not even a script!

So live dangerously! Try them all. You're sure to find 2 or 3 that you like!

Thanks everyone for your input! I definitely want to learn to write shell scripts, but these aren't much good in an MS environment and unfortunately I have to work in windows at work, so I'm kind of looking for portability as well. (BTW, if anyone has any good ideas for convincing your boss that your company needs linux, I'm all ears!) I've always heard that PHP is excellent for web development so I want to learn it as well. It sounds like python will be a good general purpose language....

I found the '99 bottles of beer on the wall' website while I was searching for info on different programming languages. If you haven't seen this I suggest checking it out...I thought it was pretty interesting!

http://internet.ls-la.net/mirrors/99bottles/