Embedded scripting language advice sought

[Saifi Khan]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 3:34 AM, Linda Messerschmidt
<linda.messerschmidt at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 2:46 PM, George Hartzell <hartzell at alerce.com> wrote:
>> I don't have any useful advice to offer, but I would love it if you
>> would summarize anything interesting that you get.
>>
>> I do a lot of computational biology work and am always interested in
>> extension language for my computing systems.
>
> There was not a lot of response.  One suggestion for Tcl and one for Ruby.
>
> I figured that all of the possibilities were going to be a pain to
> develop in their own unique way, so that was probably not the best
> evaluation criteria.  The best choice was going to be the one that the
> people who were going to use it every day were the most comfortable
> with.
>
> So what I did was code up little samples in each of the serious
> contenders: Lua, Python, Ruby, and Tcl.  Without telling people which
> language was which, I sent them around for votes.  I really liked the
> Tcl syntax and I thought it was going to do really well, but Python
> came back the winner.
>
> Even so, I kept researching for farther-flung alternatives and turned
> up a couple of others as well, although several of the "embedded
> languages" are pretty stale, dead, or haven't gotten past
> 0.0.1-pre-alpha.  Of the "haven't heard of it before" languages, only
> one called Pike earned serious consideration.  (Technically I had
> heard of its predecessor LPC, but only as a result of a misspent
> youth. :-) )
>
> Pike and Python went head to head and, probably since our team is
> heavy with C++ programmers, Pike came out on top.
>
> So, we've started doing a proof-of-concept using Pike and we'll see
> how it goes.  So far so good, and it's actually a pretty fun language
> to work with.
>
> -LM

Are you saying the choice is made on the basis of 'likeability' and
not 'technical merit' ?


-- 
thanks
Saifi.