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Hi all. I have been a devoted and loyal fanatic of Textpad going on 4 years now. While I have pretty much mastered Textpad's Regular expressions, I so much want to learn a programming language that will make the best use of that knowledge and allow me an edge. Sure wish Textpad made a language, I would be in there for sure.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Darin

Are you done with Mastering Regular Expressions by Friedl, Second Edition?
If not, it's a must, he will also give you pointers regarding language selection.
In it he covers Perl, .Net and Java. HTH

At the risk of offending loyal fans of Perl, Perl tends to be (in my humble opinion) somewhat unreadable and hard to get to grips with. It's an old language, invented way back when, full of all sorts of archaic constructs. It tends to create "spaghetti code", chock full of punctuation characters.

.NET is Manufacturer specific (it ties you to Microsoft), and platform specific (it ties you to Windows, at least for the moment).

Java is nice, but like C++ it needs to be compiled before it will run. If you want something you can just write and run straight away, you'll need something more immediate.

I'd recommend PHP and Python. PHP does everything Perl can do, but has a more modern (read easier) syntax. Python is the new kid on the block and is just starting to make headway. Both of them can do regular expressions, and both are extremely well documented, with documentation being both free and online.

ramonsky wrote:At the risk of offending loyal fans of Perl, Perl tends to be (in my humble opinion) somewhat unreadable and hard to get to grips with. It's an old language, invented way back when, full of all sorts of archaic constructs. It tends to create "spaghetti code", chock full of punctuation characters.

Though I'm not a big Perl user--I use it from time to time when I need to write a script and a shell script won't do--I find it laughable that you would judge a language by its age. Especially one written written in the mid-80's (way back when?). Some great languages are much older.

Having started programming with You-Know-What myself, I don't recommend any flavour of Basic.

What I do recommend is a language which

• Is both, Open Source and available for free (as in 'free beer')
  Is A pure oo language as Ruby or Phyton (and not, say, C++ or Perl)
  Is platform independent (not a Linux or Windows specific language, this cancels out bash programming as well as Microsoft specific languages. Note that Java is not platform independant, Java is a platform)
  Easy to learn , while offering the capability of solving 'real world' problems
  Has a community known to be newbie friendly and supportive
  Has good material available - as electronic and paper books and tutorials

Having said that, I'd recommend Ruby because I know it and recommend Phyton, too, althought I know it quite not as well as Ruby.
But oth languages are similar with respect to the stuff I listed above.

Stephan