[ale] Programming and preferred languages?

[Chris Fowler]

> From: "leam hall" <leamhall at gmail.com>
> To: "Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts" <ale at ale.org>
> Sent: Thursday, February 2, 2017 12:37:34 PM
> Subject: [ale] Programming and preferred languages?

> I've coded in a few languages and have a couple I really enjoy. However, they
> don't tend to fall in the "lots of jobs" or "direct tie to Linux" category. The
> idea I've had so far is to pick a language I really enjoy and learn things like
> OOP, TDD, refactoring, etc.
> Not sure this is a good path though. I'm not young and am still trying to move
> from Linux admin to coder type of guy.

Really depends on where you want to work or what you want to work with. I'm not limited to a language by an employer, but I am limited by platform. 
C# in Linux is an example. I can use Mono, but it is a lot of weight to pull in the system. 

I do C, C++, Perl and others. I'm sure I have a a few million lines in Perl. Almost every day. 

I working on a project now where I want to throttle alarms using token buckets. Idea came from a Perl program I wrote last year to simulate slow connections using master/slave pseudo pairs. It runs as a pipe or will run a command. In the past I'd do that in C, but Perl has many modules that help. 

The last few days I've been working on some SNMP+SOAP stuff. All Perl. A few days before I was working on building out a new system on RHEL 6. I'm using a package manager for that that I wrote in Perl. Using the same manger for our dev systems and converted millions of files to tarballs and build scripts. Everything goes into firmware prep as packages. 

Working on some SDN stuff. Using Perl to automate and manage 'PotS' Port off THEIR Switch. 

I used to proto in Perl and write C. With POSIX and other modules it makes it easier. I slowly stopped the C transition and only use that when I really need it and I need to address performance with some code. 

I tried some Python and Ruby, but came back due to lack of CPAN or large repositories like that. My build tree has almost 200 CPAN modules. 

I use Java on the front end web servers. Converted many of the threads in Java to call Perl programs I wrote outside of tomcat. It ran better and I had more control over the quality. Almost all the heavy lifting is done by Perl on those systems. Java does the pretty pictures. 1000s of sites communicating alarm data 24x7 back to their home bases. 95% of all that traffic and execution is in Perl. Grok'ing serial ports for alarms. Relays. Temp Probes, SNMP traps, Polling, etc. 
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