Python for everything?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2005-06-30, xeys_00 at yahoo.com <xeys_00 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I have read in the old days that C was used for everything. It
> was a systems programming language, and also did a lot of the
> same stuff Bash scripts and perl do now.

Not really.  C was used for a lot of stuff (mostly just under
Unix), but there was still tons of COBOL, FORTRAN, Lisp, and a
bunch of other languages.  Under Unix bourne shell (from which
bash evolved) has always been popular for scripting.  Sed and
awk scripts have been popular for ages as well.  Other OSes
have various JCL and batch scripting languages. C was only
popular under Unix OSes -- under most other OSes, C wasn't
popular at all.  MacOS and Windows APIs were originally
designed for use by Pascal, VAX/VMS was apparently intended to
be used via FORTRAN and BLISS-32.  C was later made available
on those platforms but you could tell it didn't really "fit"
well with the OS.

> So, in that era, C did it all, from short to tall.

My memory only goes back about 25 years, but that was never
true in my experience.

> My question is, can Python "do it all"? I am wondering what to
> learn as my scripting language.

First, stop thinking in the singular.  For starters I'd
recommend bash, Python, and awk.  Add perl if you like, but I
think it's syntax/semantics are extraordinarily nasty (I even
find the Lisp family of languages far easier to read).

> I have read that perl is good up to about 250 lines, and after
> that it gets kind of hairy.

In my experience it get's hairy a lot faster than that. :)

> However, from what little I have heard about Python, it's very
> well suited for readability due to the whitespace requirements
> of the language, and very good for large projects due to it's
> large amount of modules and it's object oriented structure.

True.

> I would like opinions as to the suitability of Python as a
> general purpose language for programming unix, everything from
> short scripts to muds.

I use Python for all sorts of programs under from a couple
lines for a normal text filter to thousands of lines with a
complex GUI.  

[Why are Python programs referred to as "scripts". Python no
more a "scripting" language than Java, Pascal, Smalltalk,
Objective C.]

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Yow! We're going to
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