scripting languages

[James Lance]

>
> I once had to script something that would run based on the sunrise and
> sunset times of where the machine was located.  Since we live on a
> spherical planet that is tilted 23 1/2 degrees, sunrise and sunset
> times don't stay the same.  Of course since I knew math and astronomy,
> I was given the task to figure it out since the previous solution of
> just periodically modifying a cron job was not going to cut it in the
> long run.  Rather than write some serious calculations in bash, I
> poked around for perl modules and found someone had already done that
> hard part for me.
>
> http://search.cpan.org/~rkhill/Astro-Sunrise-0.91/Sunrise.pm<http://search.cpan.org/%7Erkhill/Astro-Sunrise-0.91/Sunrise.pm>
>
> And behold, my first ever perl script came to life and the customer
> was very happy.
>
>
I think you'd be happy with either Perl or Python (or both).  One of the
huge advantages of Perl at the moment is CPAN.  I can't tell you how many
times I wish I had CPAN when I was working in Python.  That being said, I
really like Python.  Python+CPAN would be a dream come true.  Yes I know
about cheeseshop, pypi etc, but they aren't the same.

-James