[Klug-general] Hello and an Introduction

[Karl Lattimer]

> > Hey, nobodies perfect ;P
> 
> Do I spy the start of a distro war here?

Why bother, it only ends up with a senseless argument where no-one
understands that opinions are valid no matter what they are, but
still... I wouldn't choose gentoo. 

> 
> >>
> >> I've recently started shell scripting and my first sucessful script
> >> creates name-based vhosts on Apache (I can provide a copy if anyone
> >> would like a look, it's under the GPL of course!).
> >
> > Do you program in any other languages? Python, Perl, PHP?
> 
> PHP mainly.  I've touched on C/C++ but as I've had to learn it all of  
> my own back, it's not so hot.

C is cool, very easy to use in linux very well supported and documented
of course, as its the language of the kernel. C is for the most part
(ignoring function pointers structures and list and tree entities) is
only a procedural language, its pretty basic but not B.A.S.I.C ;) C++ I
used to be very fond of once upon a time, which was back when I was
writing DOS programs, and studying. C++ has its moments, but its a very
bloaty language, a 1k file can generate a 5M binary if you're not
careful. I don't really write linux code in C++ yet, I've been on C
mostly because its easier in many respects, but now with codegen/dia
working nicely together I may dabble a bit more ;) the object
orientation of C++ is fairly primitive in that there is no inbuilt
garbage collection etc... I doubt it has serious usefulness nowadays.
Especially with C#

> I'd love to learn more though, especially perl.  I'm not really a  
> programer, however I can really see where perl, python etc can help  
> SysAdmins automate things.

Perverse Eclectic Rubbish Lister ;) perl is good, there is a tendancy
for people to rely on it in system administration and it can become very
messy very quickly. IMHO perl only has a single redeeming feature which
is the extensive support for regular expressions, perl is primarily a
text processor, so if you wanted to expand the script you previously
mentioned to be able to change settings inside of the apache XML quickly
without using DOM/SAX perl is the way to go, the re processing would
allow you to hack something up in about 10-15 lines this is perls
advantage, quick to prototype to working script, however some people
have the strangest notion you should write large applications in it... I
don't know where they got that idea from, but leave them to it, I know I
prefer things with more capable debugging facilities.

Python isn't great for sysadmin tasks i don't think, it has great
features in the way of OOp but apart from that it seems more a serious
application language, with built in garbage collection and object
dereferencing python is a killer language. You can start things in
python and realise how far you can take the concept, then instead of
being a script its a mona lisa (the one da vinci carried around his
whole life modifying because it wasn't quite right).

Anyway, i rant.

K,