Skip to main content

Perl or Python?

Recently at work, we have been discussing the question of Perl versus Python for file copy, ftp, email and other daily, weekly or monthly automation / integration tasks. We considered Perl because some existing tasks had already been written in it, and Perl has a reputation as the System Admin's language of choice.

I took a task that needed automated and wrote it in Perl 5.8, then refined it using CPAN (sweet CPAN) for ArgvFile, Log4Perl, Carp, and Date::Calc. I find Perl to be very functional and completely able to meet my needs, but very quirky or perhaps unsettling. You see, I have been an object oriented programmer for a while now, and Perl's class system just feels "bolted on" to me. And I really had to jump through hoops to do a try/catch, but using eval with a return flag and an END block to test the return worked acceptably. I didn't test the exception module, as I did not discover it in time.

Next I tried Python 2.5. After a quick brush-up on the language, I was able to write about half of the task, and I moved on to the refinement. Python has exception handling, logging (based on Log4J just like Log4Perl is), fair argument parsing (I still like Perl's implementation), and lots more built in. The language is much more readable, and I find it very easy to write clean code as long as I steer clear of the crufty old-school classes. Oh yeah, we also have an experienced Python developer on staff (that can't hurt!).

I really wanted to recommend Ruby, as it is an awesome up-and-coming language with the same quick one-liner hack capabilities as Perl combined with a modern language design that makes me smile. The problem was, we want to use the same language for our admin tasks and for automated GUI testing of a system we integrate with, and it didn't have a functional Win32::GUI-Tester class. If we had a Ruby guru on staff, we may have risked it. But No, I have learned the hard way that projects fail if you throw too many unknown or untested technologies together. In my quick review, it seems that Ruby is slipping into a web-language niche. I really hope it doesn't become another PHP.

So, for us the answer was ...
PYTHON!

Reference Links:
ActiveState Perl
ActiveState Python
Komodo Editor
ONLamp.com: Python Dev Center
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Castle ActiveRecord with DetachedCriteria

My current development environment is Visual Studio Express C# Edition (read that as free ), Castle ActiveRecord's latest svn trunk(usually within a few days), and NHibernate svn trunk. As of NHibernate version 1.2.0, there is a very cool new class out there ... DetachedCriteria. This class lets you set all of your Castle relational attributes like BelongsTo, HasMany, etc. as lazy fetch, and over-ride this for searches, reports, or anytime you know ahead of time that you will be touching the related classes by calling detachedCriteria.SetFetchMode(..., FetchEnum.Eager). As a good netizen, I have tried to contribute to NHibernate and Castle ActiveRecord even if only in the smallest of ways . Oh yeah, I tried mapping to a SQL VIEW, and it worked GREAT! I received a comment after my last post, indicating that there is a better way, and I am sure of it, but the view guaranteed that I only have one database request for my dataset. NHibernate was wanting to re-fetch my missing as
1 comment
Read more

Castle ActiveRecord calling a Stored Procedure

Update: I have contributed patch AR-156 that allows full integration of Insert, Update and Delete to ActiveRecord models . If you've been reading my blog lately, you know that I have been seriously testing the Castle ActiveRecord framework out. I really love it, but I have an existing Microsoft SQL Server database with many stored procedures in it. I have tested the ActiveRecord model out, and I am sure that I will learn enough to be able to use it for standard CRUD (create, read, update, delete aka. insert, select, update, delete) functionality. BUT ... If I really want to integrate with my existing billing procedures, etc, I will have to be able to call stored procedures. I have taken two approaches ... write the ARHelper.ExecuteNonQuery(targetType, dmlString) method that gets a connection for the supplied type, executes dmlString, and closes it. write the ARHelper.RegisterCustomMapping(targetType, xmlString) method that allows me to add mappings that refer to my auto-gener
2 comments
Read more

Castle ActiveRecord with Criteria and Alias

Update May 25, 2007: ActiveRecord now supports DetachedCriteria, which eliminates the need for the SlicedFindAll that I wrote below. It is nice when a library moves to add support for such commonly needed functions. So in summary, use Detached criteria instead of the code below. It is still a nice example of using NHibernate sessions. I have a history log, where each history record "belongs to" a service record. I have to treat this as a child-to-parent join, since some children are orphans. I wanted to use the FindAll(Criteria), but I wanted the option to have optional criteria, orders and aliases. My solution was to create an ARAlias class to represent an Associated Entity and an alias, and then build an ARBusinessBase class with the following method: public static T[] SlicedFindAll(int firstResult, int maxResults, Order[] orders, ARAlias[] aliases, params ICriterion[] criteria) { IList list = null; ISessionFactoryHolder holder = ActiveRecordMediator.GetSessionF
Post a Comment
Read more