On 03/11/2010 06:06 AM, David Haller wrote:
Hello,
On Wed, 10 Mar 2010, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
On Wed, 2010-03-10 at 20:20 +0200, Johan wrote: [..]
I am sorry. Not enough data. Because I did not know myself what I needed. But as the replies came in and looking at the programs, I came to the conclusion, that it must be a low learning curve. Do not need it for a living, just fun.
Then I re-suggest Tcl/Tk. See http://tcl.tk. There is a Usenet group accessible via google (http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/topics?hl=en) for it (and most other languages) where you can ask when you stumble. It is a very friendly and helpful group. They are very welcoming to beginners. It is in fact a very simple language. The rules are few, and it is consistent. Don't let age decide for you. You may be surprised what you can do. And there is encouragement to be had.
I don't know Tcl (but respect it). I know perl (/Tk). As someone remarked, it can come very easily (see non-random) sigs 1 and 2. On the other paw, perl can be almost unreadble. A mess. So, as easily as some aspects of perl will be (esp. the "like a natural language" syntax stuff, e.g. '[do] $foo unless $bar'), that you can often express the flow of the logic 1:1 in perl, just as easily you can make it an utter mess.
So, it'll take some discipline on the programmer's part. Then, perl scripts can be quite understandable and easy and even fun to read. And with CPAN, you've got a wealth of superb solutions already out there (but also some crap).
And perl is very efficient in bolting together external tools and(!) parsing their outputs and juggle their arguments. More than a bash (maybe a zsh ...). And there's tons of good dokumentation, from absolute beginner to hacking perl's guts level.
apropos perl | grep '^perl'
is quite exhaustive. Start with 'man perlintro', familiarize yourself with 'perldoc -q', find a copy of 'Learing Perl' ...
Oh, and then there's the perl-golf fun part. Though not even "perl-golf", trying to figure out how and why the following perl expression works is fun and educating:
$max = [$a => $b] -> [ $a <= $b ]; ## Simon Cozens
(luckily, that one doesn't get reworked by B::Deparse :)
Oh, yes: there's a bunch of tools to help you tweak / grok code. Most notably: B::Deparse. Just run:
perl -MO=Deparse -e 'some perl expression;'
to see what perl actually does.
-dnh, selecting a number of perl-sigs ;)
Thanks. You went to a lot of work for may sake. I really do appreciate it. Now due to some other inputs it seems that I should tread lightly. Research more before settling. There is no rush. Do have a nice day. Regards Johan Sch -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org