Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2009 22:34:47 -0500 From: Linda Messerschmidt <linda.messerschmidt@gmail.com> To: freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Embedded scripting language advice sought Message-ID: <237c27100901241934y64525bcey93103ae207c7c88f@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <18804.55465.773953.874060@almost.alerce.com> References: <237c27100901181541n412f66c3v24ebae43b9efc313@mail.gmail.com> <18804.55465.773953.874060@almost.alerce.com>
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On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 2:46 PM, George Hartzell <hartzell@alerce.com> wrote: > I don't have any useful advice to offer, but I would love it if you > would summarize anything interesting that you get. > > I do a lot of computational biology work and am always interested in > extension language for my computing systems. There was not a lot of response. One suggestion for Tcl and one for Ruby. I figured that all of the possibilities were going to be a pain to develop in their own unique way, so that was probably not the best evaluation criteria. The best choice was going to be the one that the people who were going to use it every day were the most comfortable with. So what I did was code up little samples in each of the serious contenders: Lua, Python, Ruby, and Tcl. Without telling people which language was which, I sent them around for votes. I really liked the Tcl syntax and I thought it was going to do really well, but Python came back the winner. Even so, I kept researching for farther-flung alternatives and turned up a couple of others as well, although several of the "embedded languages" are pretty stale, dead, or haven't gotten past 0.0.1-pre-alpha. Of the "haven't heard of it before" languages, only one called Pike earned serious consideration. (Technically I had heard of its predecessor LPC, but only as a result of a misspent youth. :-) ) Pike and Python went head to head and, probably since our team is heavy with C++ programmers, Pike came out on top. So, we've started doing a proof-of-concept using Pike and we'll see how it goes. So far so good, and it's actually a pretty fun language to work with. -LM
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