http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1014062


in reply to C or C++ to go with Perl.

Every year since 1973 I've revisited what languages I want to learn or stay current in and it all boils down to how much time you have and what tools you need to get done what you want to get done.

To answer your question directly I've used a whole lot more Perl for SysAdmin kind of work than I have C or C++. That's not to say I haven't written XS code for a Perl module before and therefore used C. (Actually: one module I wrote for a financial firm I worked for was a hack of embedded SQL (ESQL) grafted into a Perl module. ESQL->C->XS was the path.)

I would shudder to think how much more difficult it would have been for me to automate backups back in 1990 using just C or C++ to get the job done, not to mention all of the log scraping scripts I've written, user account generation scripts and on and on. These are tasks that Perl is much more suited to. On the other hand I'd hate to write a compiler in Perl. Not that it couldn't be done, but being able to use lex to generate C code for a parser and yacc to create the finite state machine in C would make much shorter work of the task than having to do all that by hand in Perl.

I've said it in other posts on PM and I'll say it again: "right tool for the job."


Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg