I want to know which is the best scripting language right now and what you guys think its going to be the best or most used in the future, that is, in about 5-10 years. Take into account system administration and applications. This are the languages i had in mind, add more if you think other scripting languages are better or worth considering.

- Perl
- Python
- Ruby

I would say that Ruby is the best language, as for the most used in the future probably any language other than Ruby

there is no such thing as the best language, period. The "best language" will be the one you define yourself, AFTER exploring them one by one , yourself. this question is asked again and again and i can foresee what will happen after this.

Those three (Perl, Python, Ruby) are the first three that spring to my mind when I think "scripting", but I'd say that Perl and Python are each a lot more commonly in use than Ruby and thus more useful when it comes to leveraging someone else's code to get work done.

That narrows it down to two: Perl and Python. Of these two, I'd say that Python is better for quick and dirty scripting because it places simplicity and ease of understanding above all else. And with today's computers being very fast and having memory measured in the gigabytes, it often makes sense to promote clarity and simplicity above memory management and such. Also (on a personal note) Perl has a syntax and a style that is much too hodge-podge and heterogeneous for my taste.

My motto is sort of: "First, write it in Python; second, write it in C (you may skip this step)."

well all are the best languages its totally depend on you in which you are expert.
We can do all the great things with any of the language, just its depend on your command
,expert and mastery on that language.

The best scripting language is the one that you are most familiar with, AND which fits whatever problem you are trying to solve. The first criteria would take precedence----for example, it will not help you if Perl is better at some text processing task if you are much more fluent with BASH.

Perl!
Python!
Ruby!
Bash!
Lua!

Pyrubarlua!

The best language to learn is whatever they ask for in the job posting.

For a combination of:
1. being widely used
2. being easy to use
3. being a good general-purpose language
going by what I've read, I'd have to say Python. I've never really learned it, though ... I've learned very little of it, same with Ruby. I've only really put bash and PERL to any use, of these ...

Thanks guys, I think I'm going to start studying Python mostly because it has gtk+ bindings and has a lot of math functions similar to Octave. Thanks for the replies.

Enrique

The best language is the one that changes the way you think and helps you solve problems in more efficient/effective ways. There's a quote similar to my last statement somewhere. A language's purpose is to let you express an idea.

Personally, I like Ruby. It has some downsides (so do the others), but I find it is great for quick programs. It has taught me new ideas and let me experiment easily with others. The language has also helped me with many projects.

Any of the three languages should have some benefit to your programming abilities. If I were to pick two, I'd pick Ruby and Perl. Even though I've heard Perl code is hard to read, I've seen plenty that is easier to read than code I've seen in other languages. A good langauge is only part of the battle of having easy to read code. Whatever you choose, it will still be up to you to learn to write good code rather than bad code. It's not very difficult to write bad code in any of them.

for all the comments i've heard about PERL being hard to read, i have used it and read the documentation on it, and i don't see it being as bad as people act like it is, but it is a little funny ...

Any language has its bad programmers.

Perl in the list above has, I think, the widest set of features and greatest flexibility.

My favorite one.