Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 04:11:25 -0500 (CDT) From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: j mckitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: what language should i learn next ? Message-ID: <14777.65213.180814.622744@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <15385156@toto.iv>
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j mckitrick writes: > On Thu, Sep 07, 2000 at 09:33:32AM -0700, Craig Critchley wrote: > | programs, you can build gui's with tk, and if you're interested in web stuff > | you can use mod_perl with apache. it's not too hard to plug in a database > | like mySQL, either. there's also a vast library of code and add-on modules > You can (easily) use perl with a GUI? Yup. Most scripting languages now have Tk interfaces - which package was written to provide a GUI to a scripting language (tcl)! Of course, you also find access to some of the other GUI libraries as well. > | (CPAN) for all kinds of stuff - email, image processing, etc, etc. > And image processing? Yup. There are wrappers for a number of different image processing libraries. For me, the real beauty of modern - i.e., extensible, embedable - scripting languages is that it's relatively easy easy to put a wrapper around a large, complex library (see /usr/ports/devel/SWIG), allowing users to access those libraries from a scripting language. Languages with a REPL loop even allow them to do play with things interactively. Since the code doing all the work is a compiled library, the performance is the same as they'd get using FORTRAN or C or whatever they used before, but a lot less painfully. There was a session on this at a Python conference a couple of years ago. The examples included molecular modeling, gas flow goodies, airline maintenance scheduling, and similar things that you wouldn't normally think of doing in something like Python. My college years would have been a included a lot more sleep (and fun) if I'd had a Python wrapper for IMSL for my numerical analysis and numerical methods courses. <mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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