BASH Scripting
BASH scripts are extremely handy. For example, on my server I keep a copy of all my digital photographs. This uses approximately 6GB, on my laptop I have not got this amount of free space. I wrote a bash script to search for all images in a specified directory tree and then change their resolution. This was then copied to my laptop automatically.
The image gallery on this site is realised by a simple script that resizes images, copies them into the tree I specify and then creates the html code to reference all of the images.
PERL
I have found PERL to be a great language to program in when wanting to accomplish something quickly! There is no need to define variables etc, it is just easy!
Python
Python is an excellent language for both prototyping and writing programs. I have used Python to produce an image tiling script, binary file viewer and splitter, and a multi-threaded application using queues to continuously update plots, using the matplotlib library. This library uses a syntax very close to matlab for producing plots. Python is excellent for producing software that is cross platform. My binary file utilities will work on both Windows and Linux (they may well work on other architectures, but I have not tested this). GUI programming is also easy, and cross platform in Python. I will no long use Perl now I have experiment with Python.
Although I complain about C/C++ being picky to work with I found it very hard not to define types in Python as somethings didn’t work as expected unless I explicitly gave variables a type using something like var=”". Perhaps I am doing something wrong?
Matlab
Matlab is even simpler than PERL. It is another interpreted language that is mainly used for solving numerical problems. It was designed to be easy to use, and minimal time required to actually decide how to write the code. The problem with Matlab is that it is expensive and close source. Open source alternatives exist, such as Octave.
C/C++
I can code in these languages, but not particularly efficiently. I think I am finally getting my head around pointers, but find it extremely picky the way I have to define types of variables etc.
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