There are many scripting language communities claiming that the language can be used for everything but in fact, nearly everybody uses it for one specific thing, e.g.: web development. If I take a look at Ruby, for example, they tell you its general-purpose but actually everybody is using it with rails for web development only..
- Can you list me some uses of popular general-purpose scripting languages for the local PC? (except embedding) Are there any?
- Is the fast development usually worth having to bring the whole interpreter with your program? Then there would be some language-dependent performance and stability problems too in most cases..
best regards,
lamas
I tend to use Python for most things that aren’t compute bound, i.e. they aren’t restricted by how many computations you do per second. Some of the things I’ve used Python for are:
etc…
When the program/algorithm is compute bound, I use C together with Python and Ctypes. Does this fit your definition of general purpose? It’s certainly useful for a wide variety of applications, but not suitable if the program needs to crunch numbers fast.
Stability: Python 2.5/2.6 is rock solid. Never had a crash that wasn’t caused by self-stupidity.
Fast development: It’s definitely worth it for me. For the most part, in the field where I work, programmer time is orders of magnitude more valuable than processor time. I’m quite happy to let a program run for hours if I can write it in a few days instead of a few weeks.