[GRLUG] sysadmin job opening

[Ben DeMott]

In the reply I want only mentions of languages that take only 2 lines to
write a hello world application... are truly open... including
compilers/interpreter... have excellent performance through shared object
support... and have almost every popular *nix library implemented as an
extension.

So far I have...
Perl (which is a mess...been there done that)
Python (which is not a mess but has a steeper learning curve yet is much
more powerful than most other interpreted languages)
And PHP

There are many other extensions to apache... but these are the only
reasonable choices that have large communities and a large set of libraries
Heck if you really wanted to you could write a web server in as3 ... but it
wouldn't make a bit of sense.

We use java,python,php, R and C99 at my workplace along with a huge variety
of databases... we use what makes sense for the job and plays nice with
other nix technologies...  I could go on an hour long bashing rant about
java... I could also go on bashing python because of bad past experiences
with trac... but if the tool is powerful and the developer is given a great
deal of freedom the outcome depends on the individual a great deal.

This last week I had to import international postal information which came
in the form of a 9.8GB csv file.
Talend (java) kept crashing so after I wasted an hour trying to get it to
work I wrote an import app in python...  which was the right tool for the
job.   I could have written a php cli application to do the same work and it
would have saved me the time of adding several python libs to the opensuse
server but php wasn't really designed to perform long running operations and
its memory management and inability to perform threading were two reasons to
go with python.
The fact that python has more overhead to manage exceptions and program flow
in general isn't a bad thing...its more robust especially for cli apps...
but it did make the program take slightly longer to write - it just depends
on what you want to do.

That all said I've used python to write a few web applications and I much
prefer phps simplicity..zend framework and better documentation.

Alas the huge complaint about php is its type handling..and type
conversion.  Truthfully this has never been a problem for me..and honestly
it doesn't matter very much.. last time I checked post and get variables are
loosely typed also.

Is_numeric()
Is_empty()
Is_object()

Php wasn't meant to deal with binary data.. if you want to just write a c
module its open sorce so you can.. and its pretty easy : )

Parts of our infrastructure that require a main() loop are not written in
php nor would I try.

As far as java goes.. another language I didn't appreciate until I started
using it for something well suited for its level of abstraction (android
development)
If anyone wants to argue with me about its confusing class plymorphism
implementation well then I have several young coders to which I had to
explain how and why you would use a anonymous extended inner class... its
even hard to find a mention of it in the documentation.   The sun jvm is
awful that's where my original distaste of java comes from.  The jvm
modified by google performs well and behaves how it should... but that is
another contention I have with java... the "model" jvm isn't opensource!

No language is a final solution but there are bounds on practicality and
budgets my business couldn't afford closed source platforms...and I'm glad
we don't use them... there are still a ton of asp 3.0 applications floating
around... who can say when microsoft will change directions once again... or
abandon a language altogether.

On Jan 31, 2010 12:17 PM, "Topher" <topher at wcsg.org> wrote:

On Sun, 31 Jan 2010, Godwin wrote: > On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 3:32 PM, Adam
Tauno Williams > <awilli...

> > /me watches Godwin peel back the lid of a can of worms...

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