[Gllug] question about python/perl

[Tethys]

salsaman at xs4all.nl writes:

>I if not other means (e.g apache modperl). I personally wouldn't
>recommend python for system administration, simply because it runs in a
>virtual machine and therefore has more overhead. I would say learn perl
>unless you want to be an application developer

Firstly, both perl and python run in virtual machines, so there's no
real difference there. Secondly, system administration is the last
place you'd normally care about performance, so any overhead is largely
irrelevant anyway. I've spent two decades doing sysadmin with shell
scripts, which aren't exactly known for their speed. Sure, I could get
better performance from hand tuned assembly language, but the balance
between development time and run time would be horribly wrong. For 99%
of all tasks, both python and perl get that balance right.

I'd say learn python. Perl isn't quite the horror that I sometimes
jokingly make it out to be around here. But it's still got some major
downsides. Python is simple and yet more than powerful enough to do
what you want.

Tet
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