[Tutor] is it a right choice?

[Alan Trautman]

Payal,

I was in your shoes a few years ago and knew I had to learn a scripting
language. After looking at the functionality of both and writing test
programs in both I made a few observations:

1. I never learned awk and *NIX shell scripting so all of Perl's symbols
were new to me and very frustrating. Especially the multiuse $ sign. Python
reads in English which I loved.

2. Perl had a lot more libraries and already configured apps, libraries and
app plug ins. This is changing but I think it is still true.

3. They both have objects and object oriented methods so you can learn,
demonstrate, and test any items that can be done in C,C++ or JAVA. In most
(possibly all) cases you can write them faster in Python.

I chose Python because it didn't feel like a lot of work to learn and I
haven't found anything else I can't do with Python (I do use C++ for some
work still). I'm sure the Perl people can tell you many things they can do
and Python can't but the task you outline is the first business application
task I used Python for and it is really good at that type of file parsing.

In you case I certainly can't recommend C or C++ (to in-depth for no gain)
but could recommend JAVA if you have in house/friends who are JAVA
programmers to consult with.

Personally Python would be my choice for the least headache most gain in the
scenario you outlined.

HTH,
Alan

-----Original Message-----
From: Payal Rathod [mailto:payal-python@staticky.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2003 9:44 PM
To: Python Tutor ML
Subject: [Tutor] is it a right choice?


Hi,
Before I venture in the python infested world, I want to ask whether I
am making a right choice by taking python as my first programming
language. I cannot program in C, C++ or Java etc. I can *just* do little
shell scripting.
My objective in learning a better language is that I have huge log files
in my office and get many logs files from friends who are sytem admins.
I love to analyse those files and find out browing habits of my compnay
(from squid logs), most number of mails sent to a domain ( like
hotmail), number of bytes data transferred thru' http, pop3 and smtp
etc. I prefer to write my own programs to do these things.
With rudimentary shell scripting knowledge analysing log files which are
many times over 200Mb is difficult so I was seeking a language which can
do these tasks beautifully without getting too much involved in
underlying concepts.
Am I looking for Python? Is Perl easier to learn for a newbie than
python? Is it OK to continue with Python?

Also can Python produce binary programs like perl (perlcc)?

Thanks,
With warm regards,
-Payal






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