[wellylug] Help in finding a good technical/Linux related bookstore

[Phillip Hutchings]

> For instance if the machine were to run many of the tasks
> that were to be scripted.  Each invocation of the python
> interpreter will cost you more RAM than awk or sed will.  If
> the task can be done in awk or sed there's no good reason
> to choose the heavy weight alternatives.  Sure, I am happy
> to use perl; but some tasks are simple enough to be accomplished
> in awk (with a ~ 300K memory footprint) or sed (take off another
> 100K?) rather than python or perl (~ 6M footprint on both
> accounts), and with less CPU overhead as well.

If your system is smart about caching and not resource starved then
the size of the interpreter is not an issue. You'll find that the main
problem is the OS's process creation, and then the speed of the
language itself.

Personally I've written shell scripts in Perl, PHP, Python and sh,
though it may have used bashisms. Python is slow, but we know that.
Perl is a lot faster. Pure shell scripts using awk etc take a lot more
programmer time.

The most important thing here is CPU time is cheap, programmer time isn't.

> You're saying that todays hardware can tackle all that? True,
> but then, just use java ... oh, python can do the same things
> and is as portable?  Well, almost, yah: but how much demand
> is there for python programmers in the wild?

OneSquared would like some Python developers! Maybe not right now, but
there's a good chance in the future.

-- 
Phillip Hutchings
http://www.sitharus.com/