I've been thinking about this lately too, particularly in light of an
upcoming project that might have to be written in a mangled mash of php,
perl and expect. the expect is the scary part, because I don't really know
it. it will be a chimpanzee upon my back.

In general, I write a program if I think it'll take less time to write the
program than it would to solve the problem by hand (or, if about the same,
if writing the code will be more interesting.)

My tools are pretty limited: mostly Perl and PHP, so my choice usually
comes down to:
If it requires a MySQL databases, I've gotta use PHP (the Perl interface
isn't set up right on my box). If it requires massive amounts of regex, I
try to use Perl. If it wants a command line interface, I prefer Perl there
too. And if it wants to be a web-thing, PHP is easier.

Not very sophisticated, but it works.

Ken


At 10:33 AM 04/26/2004 -0500, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
>I suspect the answer deserves many considerations. For example, do you
>have the time to code? Will the time spent actually result in a
>solution? Is the problem big enough to really worry about and therefore
>is the solution worth the time? To what degree is a solution dictated
>by the existing computing environment?

Ken Irwin                                               [log in to unmask]
Reference/Electronic Resources Librarian        (937) 327-7594
Thomas Library, Wittenberg University