[Beowulf] g77 limits...

[Joe Landman]

Odd, I thought it was Ruby.  On Rails at that. :^

Dan Stromberg wrote:
> python's the way of the future though :)  Agreed that shell (bash) and
> make are important, and regular expressions of a (very powerful)
> necessary evil.

I have always had problems with any language that begins its self 
justification with "because it's not X" where X is any of Fortran, Perl, 
APL, ...

My choices would be C and Perl to start for systems and lower level 
programming.  Higher level stuff (glueing code / processes together) 
would be Perl and X (pick the X of your choice, Python, Ruby, ...). 
Fast HLL type but really fast interface to a huge corpus of numerical 
libraries I would recommend Fortran.  Yeah, well, it works, really well, 
and though some people would rather naw off their fingers than allow 
themselves to type a do loop, it doesn't reflect upon the language.

For algorithm design/testing, I might recommend Matlab/Octave.  Yeah, 
lots of people have mixed feelings on this.  I like the immediacy of the 
feedback.  It actually makes life a little easier as a prototype bit.

For SMP, OpenMP.  Just make your life easier unless you are designing an 
OS or some sort of complex low level service.  For DMP, MPI, usually LAM 
or similar.  Nothing against MPICH, just I have had somewhat better luck 
using LAM and using it to diagnose problems with machines and applications.

In the end the choice of language depends strongly upon what you are 
doing and what you need to do.  Some languages are uniformly 
ill-equipped to the tasks they are set to.  Some are well equipped, but 
for various fad reasons, are out of favor in deference to the flavor of 
the day.

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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