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Use what works for you. In my case, that's python. It's portable (cross platform), the final product is (usually) the script files themselves vs. an architect

Use what works for you. In my case, that's python. It's portable (cross platform), the final product is (usually) the script files themselves vs. an architecture specific "executable", and the language includes "batteries" I find useful in the standard distribution: XML, JSON, and (a limited amount of) HTML parsing, URL parsing and retrieving, regular expressions - stuff that makes what I love to do (data wrangling) easy. Additionally it has the benefit of being pre-installed on my OS of choice, OS X, and in that specific distribution a very useful third-party library comes pre-bundled: pyobjc This means that I can write what is, in essence, a plain text file that "runs" on most any recent version of OS X and has almost full access to Apple's ObjC (and C) APIs for controlling their systems. Talk about power! And if someone on OS X wants to change the program? Nothing more than a text editor is needed. No need to re-compile, install an IDE, or a set of developer tools (outside of the python interpreter itself, which is pretty much on everything but Windows out of the box). This last reason is specifically why python is very popular in the OS X sysadmin world right now. A large number of great open source OS X tools are written in python.

emeraldd 13y ago
Beyond just OS X, you can use python and most other languages in that space on cheap, ubiquitous hosting without having to pay extra licensing fees. For me, this is one of the biggest advantages to going the open source route. There are, of course, downsides to not having a company backing your tools, but they can be balanced against the community associated with the your language of choice. There's also the build/test/deployment cycle when developing, which pudquick touched on indirectly. With scripting languages, deploying a new build to test is usually as simple as saving and restarting the process. Sometimes you don't have to go past saving. The last time I dealt with C# and languages in that space (C/Java/ etc..) a build cycle involved a compiling a potentially several more steps. If you've worked with languages that don't require that, having to use one that does can get annoying pretty quickly. Especially if the project is of any size. Another big point is the availability of libraries to do things you want to do. Most of the open source language platforms have large repositories of libraries that you can pull into your project with ease (pip, rubygems, cpan, pear, clojars, etc ...) and management tools (gem, bundler, cpan, perl-lib, composer, leiningen, pip, etc ...) to simplify installing/using those libraries. One other thing, and this is one I see as absolutely huge, python, ruby, php, etc encourage pull people into a larger community if you get beyond anything trivial. This exposes a developer to other languages, other platforms, and other ways of looking at software. Of course, that means the developer has to go looking as well. Still, there are four (non-comprehensive) big reasons to use any language: * It pays the bills * Its a good technical choice for the "job"/project * You like working with it * You have to maintain someone else's toys

emeraldd 13y ago

Beyond just OS X, you can use python and most other languages in that space on cheap, ubiquitous hosting without having to pay extra licensing fees. For me, this is one of the biggest advantages to going the open source route. There are, of course, downsides to not having a company backing your tools, but they can be balanced against the community associated with the your language of choice. There's also the build/test/deployment cycle when developing, which pudquick touched on indirectly. With scripting languages, deploying a new build to test is usually as simple as saving and restarting the process. Sometimes you don't have to go past saving. The last time I dealt with C# and languages in that space (C/Java/ etc..) a build cycle involved a compiling a potentially several more steps. If you've worked with languages that don't require that, having to use one that does can get annoying pretty quickly. Especially if the project is of any size. Another big point is the availability of libraries to do things you want to do. Most of the open source language platforms have large repositories of libraries that you can pull into your project with ease (pip, rubygems, cpan, pear, clojars, etc ...) and management tools (gem, bundler, cpan, perl-lib, composer, leiningen, pip, etc ...) to simplify installing/using those libraries. One other thing, and this is one I see as absolutely huge, python, ruby, php, etc encourage pull people into a larger community if you get beyond anything trivial. This exposes a developer to other languages, other platforms, and other ways of looking at software. Of course, that means the developer has to go looking as well. Still, there are four (non-comprehensive) big reasons to use any language: * It pays the bills * Its a good technical choice for the "job"/project * You like working with it * You have to maintain someone else's toys