my development style brings me to write a lot of throw-away “assisting” code,
whether for automatic generation of code parts, semi-automated testing, and generally to build dummies, prototypes or temporary “sparring partners” for the main development; I know I’m not the only one…
since I frequently work both under windows and Unicies, I’d like to non-exclusively focus on a single “swiss army knife” tool that can work in both the environments with limited differences, that would allow me to do usual stuff like text parsing, db access, sockets, nontrivial filesystem and process manipulation
until now under unix I’ve used a bit of perl and massive amounts of shell scripts, but the latter are a bit limited and perl… despite being very capable and having modules for an incredible array of duties, sincerely I find it too “hostile” for me for something that goes beyond 100 lines of code.
what would you suggest?
scripting is not a requirement, it would be ok to use more static-styled languages IF it makes development faster (getting programs to actually do their work and possibly in a human readable state) and if it doesn’t become nightmarish to handle errors/exception and to adapt to dynamic environments (e.g. I don’t like to hardwire data /db table structure in my code, especially by hand).
I’ve been intrigued by python, ruby, but maybe groovy (with its ability to access the huge class library and his compact syntax) or something else is better suited
thanks a lot in advance!
(meanwhile, on a completely different note, scala looks really tempting just for the cleanliness of it, but that’s – probably – a completely different story, unless you tell me the opposite…?)
Python is arguably one of the best choices. Its biggest benefit is that it has a huge built-in library for doing all sorts of stuff. It is also mature, very cross-platform, actively developed, and has many support options (mailing lists, newsgroups, etc).
In addition, it has a built-in GUI toolkit (tkinter) for those times when you need to write a quick GUI to get input from a user or display output from a running process. And if you don’t like tkinter, there are other cross-platform GUI toolkits available.