Alternatives to Python ?

[Alan Gauld]

On Thu, 19 Jun 2003 20:01:39 +1000, Gary Duncan 
> There's been occasional not-unfavourable comments in this news-group
> about the pros-and-cons of other so-called "high-level-languages" like
> Ruby, and Haskell , and others too.
> 
> I can't afford to buy more than one such book from the list of HLLs;
> so what would you suggest ?

Why buy a book at all initially?
There are web tutorials for most languages and there are free
downloads to get the software itself. Try before you buy seems a
good motto in this situation.

Also many good books are available online. The Hunt/Thomas book
on Ruby for example is posted on their web site in PDF format.

Also the decision will depend on what you want to use the new
language for. If its to explore Functional Programming themn
Haskell is the obvious choice. If its to do text processing
snowball4 might be a wiser move. For web programming you might
like PHP. Ruby is a good general purpose language like Python.

Have a look at the web resources, try the languages, if it
tickles your fancy then it's time to think about a dead tree
book.

HTH,

Alan G.