Centauri's Thoughts

I have been a programmer for many years, and when I was first learning computer languages, I thought I could solve all the worlds problems in this language I was working in. After all, I was proficient in it, and could see many uses for it.

After some time and few more languages, I began to learn that each language has its strengths and weaknesses. Although I can make most any language I am familiar with, do what I need it do to (with some coaxing), I lost those magical goggles that said any one language was perfect for all things.

That brings me to the power of scripting and pipelining. lets say you have something like this:

grep mystring Myfile | sort | cut -f1 > newfile

grep could be a C program, and sort could be a ruby script and cut could be a perl program. Of course, in this example, they would most likely ALL be C, but the point is they don't have to be.

Its a matter of using the best tool for the job. Some are good at string processing, some are tooled for the math, some can deal in arrays and hashes extremely well. The point is to understand the strengths (and weaknesses) of each language, and make the best decisions you can on this (given that you understand each language sufficiently well).

I suppose this is why I explore so many different languages, and try to do my standard program project in each one to learn the basics of the language (my standard project is to make a rolodex, which incorporates the entry and edit of name, address, city, state and zip, phone number into a collection of records, with full add, edit, update and delete abilities)