Up: general computing

Computer Languages

According to Larry Wall, the author of the PERL, the three cardinal virtues of a hacker are Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. To that end, this page is designed for the programmer who is too lazy to poke around the Geometry Center system to find out what's there, provided this hypothetical programmer is not too impatient or proud to read it...

For application programming

For most serious programming, the Center staff typically use C or one of its object oriented descendents. In its favor, C code is reasonably portable, C compilers are reasonably optimized, and a lot of people are familiar with C.

Some points of which to take note:

For User Interfaces

For quick, painless user interface design the Tcl scripting language, along with its X11 interface package Tk is the way to go. For more serious development, Tcl provides for implementing native functions in C, and compiled binaries. For example, Pisces is being developed with Tcl/Tk. Some points of which to take note:

For Scripts

Forget sed, awk, sh, csh, and grep. PERL is the only way to go. PERL is an amazing conglomeration of the best features of all the major unix utilities. It is easy to learn the bare essential s, and start getting things done. On the other hand, for the hardcore hacker, there is virtually no upper bound to the trickiness and subtlety you can pack into a PERL script. Some points of which to take note:

Other Languages


Up: general computing

[HOME] The Geometry Center Home Page

Comments to: webmaster@geom.umn.edu
Created: Fri Sep 8 11:39:00 1995 --- Last modified: Jun 18 1996