[Sussex] Salutations!

[Alan Fitton]

>I think a lot of people find the likes of Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE very
>comfortable at first, but ultimately the desire to tune things to their 
>taste
>overcomes them and they end up using something a little more hands on.
>Ultimately any Linux distro is as good as another if you have the knowledge
>to tune it to your taste, some just start out from a place that is easier 
>for
>certain tasks.

The problem i find with RedHat and Mandrake is that their strength also 
becomes their weakness. Countless features are implemented (often not very 
well) that merely complicate the system and make it hard for a user 
interested in customising it to know what is going on under the hood. I 
appreciate a system i can build up, not strip down.

Also, when I installed RedHat 9 it somehow managed to "forget" to install 
ANY modules, leaving the system quite useless until i recompiled (and 
debugged) their warped kernel sources.

I tend to visualise Slackware as carefully linked blocks forming a nice 
shape, and distros like RedHat and Mandrake as big, ugly blobs of paper 
mache....

>Now, now.. I'm no great fan of Perl (as list regulars will now), but it is
>very definitely a _real_ programming language as are tcl and bash.  Those
>languages are very powerful in their own right.   There is a lot of 
>snobbery
>amongst programmers, a kind of mental heirarchy.  In my time I've written
>everything from 68000 assembly code, through C and C++ up to Basic,
>Javascript, VBScript and even LOGO (OK, the last one was in school ;) ).  
>In
>a few weeks time I will be joining a company that bases it's product 100% 
>on
>Linux and Python.  Python is a language the occupies very much the same 
>space
>as Perl (although its approach is different).  I am very happy to be moving
>to this language, and I very definitely consider it to be a real 
>programming
>language.  Sure, Python can't be used to write the kernel of an operating
>system, but then C/C++ can be unecessarily difficult if you need to write a
>frontend to a database application.  It's horses for courses!

I'm most interested in learning C++, Perl and PHP. I think I would get the 
most benefit from these. Perl for general system administration and CGI 
(sure, you can use other languages for CGI but I would say perl is best 
suited, generally). PHP would be very useful for www stuff. I like 
interpreted langauges, they make things much simpler though not suited for 
everything mainly because of performance.

My enocunter with TCL was making a simple Mohammed Al-Sahaf (the Iraqi 
information minister with his dubious claims) quote script for an IRC 
channel I'm in on EFnet, turned out to be a good laugh. Helped me get to 
grips with TCL.

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