Odd, I thought it was Ruby. On Rails at that. :^ Dan Stromberg wrote:
python's the way of the future though :) Agreed that shell (bash) and make are important, and regular expressions of a (very powerful) necessary evil.
I have always had problems with any language that begins its self justification with "because it's not X" where X is any of Fortran, Perl, APL, ...
My choices would be C and Perl to start for systems and lower level programming. Higher level stuff (glueing code / processes together) would be Perl and X (pick the X of your choice, Python, Ruby, ...). Fast HLL type but really fast interface to a huge corpus of numerical libraries I would recommend Fortran. Yeah, well, it works, really well, and though some people would rather naw off their fingers than allow themselves to type a do loop, it doesn't reflect upon the language.
For algorithm design/testing, I might recommend Matlab/Octave. Yeah, lots of people have mixed feelings on this. I like the immediacy of the feedback. It actually makes life a little easier as a prototype bit.
For SMP, OpenMP. Just make your life easier unless you are designing an OS or some sort of complex low level service. For DMP, MPI, usually LAM or similar. Nothing against MPICH, just I have had somewhat better luck using LAM and using it to diagnose problems with machines and applications.
In the end the choice of language depends strongly upon what you are doing and what you need to do. Some languages are uniformly ill-equipped to the tasks they are set to. Some are well equipped, but for various fad reasons, are out of favor in deference to the flavor of the day.
-- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Founder and CEO Scalable Informatics LLC, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com phone: +1 734 786 8423 fax : +1 734 786 8452 cell : +1 734 612 4615 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
