Running Linux, Third Edition

Other Languages

There are many other popular (and not-so-popular) languages available for Linux. For the most part, however, these work identically on Linux as on other Unix systems, so there’s not much in the way of news there. There are also so many of them that we can’t cover them in much detail here. We do want to let you know what’s out there, however, and explain some of the differences between the various languages and compilers.

Python has gained a lot of attention lately, because it is a powerful mixture of different programming paradigms and styles. For example, it is one of the very few interpreted object-oriented programming languages (Perl being another example, but only relatively late in its existence). Python fans say it is especially easily learned. Python was almost entirely written and designed by Guido van Rossum, who chose the name because he wrote the interpreter while watching reruns of the British TV show Monty Python’s Flying Circus. You can read all about Python at http://www.python.org or in Programming Python by Mark Lutz.

LISP is an interpreted language used in many applications, ranging from artificial intelligence to statistics. It is used primarily in computer science, because it defines a clean, logical interface for working with algorithms. (It also uses a lot of parentheses, something computer scientists are always fond of.) It is a functional programming language and is very generalized. Many operations are defined in terms of recursion instead ...