Yuri,
I second everythig Ethan Merritt said, but would add: awk is easier and as functional as Perl for
"quick and dirty" projects. Once you need Perl's complexity, you're probably better off
moving to Python or a compiled language; Perl is powerful, but it allows you to do really dirty
coding; I found myself writing an "elegant" Perl script that I did not understand anymore
1/2y later.
I would also add Fortran (maybe Fortran90) to the list of higher level
languages.
Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer, I "hack" things together...
Cheers,
Jens
-----Original message-----
From: Ethan Merritt <merr...@u.washington.edu>
To: CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Sent: 1970 Jan, Thu, 1 00:00:00 GMT+00:00
Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] writing scripts-off topic
On Monday, 23 January 2012, Yuri Pompeu wrote:
Hello Everyone,
I want to play around with some coding/programming. Just simple calculations from an
input PDB file, B factors averages, occupancies, molecular weight, so forth...
What should I use python,C++, visual basic?
What you describe is primarily a task of processing the text in a PDB file.
I would recommend perl, with python as a more trendy alternative.
If this is to be a springboard for a larger project, then you might choose
instead to use a standard library like cctbx to do the fiddly stuff and
call it from a higher level language (C or C++).
Ethan
