[TAG] Language choice

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 06:37:30PM +0100, Thomas Adam wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 13:35:01 -0400
> "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 05:15:08PM +0100, Thomas Adam wrote:
> > > On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 12:12:40 -0400
> > > "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > > > The target environments are SCO OS5 and quite some different
> > > > number of Linux distros; the possible languages are Python and
> > > > Perl.
> > > 
> > > Graphical / Console or both?
> > 
> > I suppose that was pertinent, yes; it's a menu program; text, but full
> > screen.
> 
> Who cares what language you'll write it in? ncurses is ported to
> Solaris, as is slang. You can probably even use "dialog". All of these
> libaries have bindings to lots of languages. As for the "benefit" pffft.
> Just use what comes naturally to you.

I apologize; I *thought* I'd made my specific point clear on the first
pass:

This program, when done, sold and shipped, needs to be able to install
and run reliably on all target platforms without conflicting with, or,
really, depending on, whatever language runtimes might or might not
already be there.  I don't object to depending on what's there, or
brilliant installers, or any of that stuff, but on SCO, I'm likely to
have an ancient Perl and no Python at all...

and on Linux, you never know *what* will be there -- or what you might
break if you have library/module conflicts.

So, again, going back to Fred Brooks' System Program Product concept
(you know, the thing that takes 9 times as long as a simple hack? :-),
what is the best approach to this?

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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	"You know: I'm a fan of photosynthesis as much as the next guy,
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