Vulnerability Development mailing list archives
Re: Regarding a selection for mobile code/scripting language
From: Bennett Todd <bet () rahul net>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 10:15:51 -0500
Whew. That's an ambitious project. You're tackling some problems I've tacked in radically different ways (e.g. strong software packaging for enterprise system configuration management). More power to you, we need new looks at hard problems. I stand by my recommendation of Lua for some of those problems, it's an exceedingly pleasing language to script --- doesn't look "alien" to most folks --- and it's small and light and tight. But some of your problems ("record" a session where a sysadmin interactively does a job, abstracting it so you can automatically "replay" it against other hosts in batch) you've urgently got to be able to robustly manipulate your scripting code as data. For that, there's one well-known clear winner: lisp. Depending on whether you want to start with small/minimalist/clean/elegant and then build out the features you need and want, or whether you want to start with 17 different kitchen sinks, one each in the favourite colours of each programmer who ever washed a dish in his life, you want either scheme or Common Lisp. The lisps unify code and data --- manipulate wads of code as data --- like no other language ever. In fact, a case could be made that that's the real, deep definition of a lisp. -Bennett
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Current thread:
- Regarding a selection for mobile code/scripting language Eric Knight (Jan 13)
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- Re: Regarding a selection for mobile code/scripting language Eric Knight (Jan 14)
- Re: Regarding a selection for mobile code/scripting language Bennett Todd (Jan 14)
- Re: Regarding a selection for mobile code/scripting language Eric Knight (Jan 14)
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