<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(carpetsmoker @ Jan 19 2007, 12:08 PM) [snapback]275665[/snapback]</div>
Quote:
It's ~100 lines, easy to understand, easy to make, and useful, besides that.
It's nor written in C, it's written in PHP, which is greatly undervalued as a general purpose scripting language (almost a drop-in replacement for perl)[/b]
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I've been developing with PHP professionally for nearly 10 years. I love the language and I have a ton invested in it. However, it's no where near a "drop-in replacement" for perl. Perl still absolutely spanks it in terms of string and file handling, among many other things. Much as I love PEAR and PECL, they don't yet hold a candle to CPAN. The list goes on and on.
My point is that choice of language is appropriate. A beginner would probably be better suited to learning a higher-level language which handles memory management and has a more traditional, procedural model. Tcl, Perl, and PHP are all fine choices (Python is an excellent first language, but not really suited to that list). Someone with a stronger background in math (discrete math, lambda calculus, etc) may find languages such as Haskell, Lisp, and their ilk easier to learn. OOP is not the easiest paradigm in the world to wrap your mind around and writing garbage that's object-oriented just for the sake of it is counter-productive. Ever see a long-time C programmer's early stabs at Java? It's not pretty.
Personally, it all comes back to the functional languages for me. I'll always love C, but there's little in the programming world as expressive and elegant as Lisp.