[GRLUG] sysadmin job opening

[Bob Kline]

It depends on what you know,
and maintainability.  The latter
meaning that only high level
languages with a large community
of users makes any commercial
sense.  e.g., don't do a project in
ADA today.

Ken Thompson wrote Unix in
assembly language.  Ritchie came
along later, developed "C", and
Unix was mostly rewritten in "C".
Of course "C" was considered a
high level language at the time, but
probably not today.

If you know enough about assembly
language you can of course rewrite
the instruction set on your CPU,  and
then write your project in a completely
new "language."  But only things CS
majors probably think too much about.

What language is "best?"  Good luck.
I can remember flame wars based on
whether a "goto" in C was a legitimate
thing to use.   Today,  life's short...

    -- Bob


On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Ben DeMott <ben.demott at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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