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Date:      Sun, 20 Jan 2002 18:28:23 +0100
From:      Cliff Sarginson <cliff@raggedclown.net>
To:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Re[2]: what is a good language for system administration?
Message-ID:  <20020120172823.GA1952@raggedclown.net>
In-Reply-To: <15434.60221.196994.279757@guru.mired.org>
References:  <15434.31399.395825.846309@guru.mired.org> <374787884.20020120160650@cybertron.tmfweb.nl> <15434.60221.196994.279757@guru.mired.org>

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On Sun, Jan 20, 2002 at 10:07:25AM -0600, Mike Meyer wrote:
> Alfatrion <alfatrion@cybertron.tmfweb.nl> types:
> 
<SNIP>
> True. There's a couple of Python-specific remote method invocation
> implementations floating around, but I haven't investigated them. I
> like the ability to choose the language appropriate for each object
> that comes with using CORBA.
> 

Mmm, considering this and other answers (including my own), they are
all trying to answer the question (what is "good" for system
administration). The question may have have been what, in a practical
sense is the best to learn in terms of portability, skills, and
what may shine best on your CV as a "Unix Systems Admin" 

The answer to these two questions is not the same.

For the wider world I think the answer is still:

- Know the shell backwards and all the needed tools for use with the
  shell.
- (Painful as I find this to say) learn Perl. There is such a huge
  amount of canned modules for Perl available, and it is increasingly
  used where people used to write "C" for something too slow to be
  done in the shell, that I don;t think there are any other players
  seriously in the game yet.

Java (the language) and Java (the script) .. which do not have any
relationship to each other whatsoever btw .. are not really used,
or are ever likely to be, for Systems Administration at it's usual
level. Most of the other suggestions are still really "niche" markets.

Mmm. There was as usual, the comment that it is possible to write
cryptic code in any language. Due to the totally eccentric nature of
Perl, it's completely undisciplined growth, it's lack of syntactic
integrity, it's arbitrary semantics etc etc .. it makes it much easier 
to do this than in most other languages :). But it's here to stay.

-- 

Regards
Cliff



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