I'll strongly agree with Roy on this one. Yesterday a coworker came to me asking text editors. I said, "For what do you need a good text editor?" Turns out she couldn't open a file in Notepad.... It was 3.6 GB in size (which you wouldn't want to open anyway) In the end, all we needed to do was a clever grep against the file to extract some specific data. And that's just a simple example.

So yes, sooner or later you'll find yourself needing a flexible programming language to solve a problem. Had our searching been more than a simple series of greps, I would have jumped into Perl to accomplish the task, but I'm sure other languages would work just as well.

--Joel


Joel Richard
IT Specialist, Web Services Department
Smithsonian Institution Libraries | http://www.sil.si.edu/
(202) 633-1706 | (202) 786-2861 (f) | [log in to unmask]



________________________________
From: Roy Tennant <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:57:23 -0400
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] newbie

On Mar 24, 2010, at 7:17 PM, Tim <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Largest website in Perl: Del.icio.us
>
> Largest website in PHP: Facebook

You're assuming the only use for a programming language is to
dynamically serve up a web site. That would be a serious mistake.
Roy