Seems i'm here and there may be some geeks who can help me out.

I'm writing a program for my diss that will load most of its data from flat files(text files). I will need to compared data, be able to track user activity from their passwords, create backups and allow users to add data, possibly via menu system.

The programm will also be getting data via snmp but i think i'll let someone elses app do that for me.

So for this type of program (the top part) which language do you think I should use?

Jave (i've used this a bit in uni and have a nice java jdk5 book sitting on my desk)

or

Perl (not used - willing to learn)


If you have any neat articles (not wikipedia) that you can linkey me that gives a comparison between both that would be great. I'll naturally keep looking myself.

I'd choose Perl over Java just because of personal preference. Sounds like your program is supposed to do quite basic stuff, so any language should be fine for it.
Java's OO might be a bit of a bloat, but that could be me simply disliking OO.
For simple programming, not caring about private methods etc you're better off with Perl.

thanks. all input is good input. I'll be sure to credit you in the bibliography

If you already know Java, I'd use that. If it's for something as important as a dissertation I wouldn't take any chances trying to get to grips - and possibly failing, or at least not having it work as well as it could - with a language you don't know, unless you get extra credit or something for doing that.

If you want to a learn a language that is going to be used in your future professional career, then Java without question.

If you want to learn a very, very powerful text processing language then Perl is the way to go.

If you are processing simple text files, a Java program is more resource intensive than Perl. BUT Java is going to be a bit easier to learn, a lot of people struggle with the cryptic Perl and the benefits of lower lines of code in Perl versus Java might be offset by the differences in learning curve.

My choice? Java... simply because Java is now becoming the defacto standard for a lot of projects. Also because I work for the company buying Sun, so Java is a bit closer to my line of work than something like Perl.

ah thanks yeager. I read that perl you can do one thing in 'a thousand ways' and was tempted to learn perl.

One part of the program is to use the snmp language to go hunt out what is really connected to the network and I found most of these seemed to be written in perl. This is what made me compare the languages and wonder if I might be better off learning perl.

We did a year or so in java so I have a bit of a head start there and i've got a half decent coherent list of good and bad points.

Quote from jaykay3000 :

yeh, he just complained at uss that in the first hand in which is like a pre-runner to the main design phase hand in that he complained most of uss had said we were using one thing without exploring the other options that are out there so as a long shot I decided to ask here as I think perl and java are fairly similair. I could I guess compare them with c++ and python... but woa... could be here for 22 days on that. lol

You might want to spend some effort on your English skills as well as programming, I barely understood a word of what you wrote.

The words were easy on their own. But I couldn't form coherent sentences out of them

Syntax error

Quote from tristancliffe :

The words were easy on their own. But I couldn't form coherent sentences out of them

Now that sounds like he might be better off with Perl!

trying to do diss and read forum. bad idea :P

Diss?

As in Daisy Does Dallas?

I would choose Java in your situation for a few reasons:

• You already have familiarity with Java (quicker to develop and learn with something you already have a good knowledge base in).
  
• The Java help/support community is larger than that for Perl, so when you get stuck you'll probably find the answer more easily.
  
• The performance is likely to be very similar in most aspects between the 2.
  
• GUI (frontend) coding in Java is much more popular than in Perl.
  
• Java is a much more common language than Perl in the current job market.
  

Also, I'm wondering if you are forced into storing the data in text files or if you have a degree of freedom in that. If you have some freedom and you do choose Java you might want to look into using some sort of database to store your data rather than just text files.

Using Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) you can store your user data in a database. You can use a massive variety of different types of database with different syntaxes (e.g. SQL-92 on a local JavaDB (Apache Derby), MS-SQL on a SQL Server or many others). The advantages of using a database rather than a flat files are numerous. If you use a persistent database (one that's always running even if your tracking application isn't) you won't need to read all your data in when you start your application. When you update your data you won't need to write it all out to file. The DBMS can help in ensuring your data is stored correctly (e.g. enforcing Primary Key / Foreign Key constraints).