[vorbis] Batch-Tagging oggs?

[Craig Dickson]

Peter Harris wrote:

> > What programming language (should I get bold and try to do some first-time
> > programming) would you recommend for such a feat ;-)
> 
> Bash, maybe? (See www.cygwin.com for a Win32 bash).

Bash is okay if you already know it. I wouldn't recommend it otherwise.
Python or Perl would be better.

> The 'B' in BASIC stands
> for 'Beginner'. It's a good language to start with (and you might even be
> able to find qbasic.exe on your windows install disk).

I don't know if Windows still ships with qbasic. I'd be sort of
surprised if it did. There is something called Visual Scripting Host
in Windows these days which I believe is based on Visual Basic.

I can't agree that BASIC is a good language for anyone under any
circumstances, particuarly not the sort of line-numbered, unstructured
BASIC that qbasic was. All forms of BASIC that I've seen discourage
thinking by trying to reduce programming to something comprehensible by
people who can't think.

> Java-the-language is
> nice in some ways, but I don't like Java-the-VM. Unfortunately, the two seem
> to be tied rather tightly together (although recent gcc has a native backend
> for Java).

It's one of Sun's more unfortunate lies that Java the language and the
JVM naturally go together. There's no reason you couldn't produce
binaries from Java, given a suitable compiler (and perhaps gcc 3.0 will
allow this; I haven't looked into it). I suspect one reason for Java's
failure to live up to its early hype is that Sun successfully made people
think that it was suitable only for web applets by insisting that Java
had to be compiled to JVM byte-code (particularly in the days before
good JIT compilers, which are still not universal).

> I'm not familiar with Python or Smalltalk, but I've heard good
> things about them. Perl is nice, but don't try to learn the whole language
> at once.

For a beginner, Python is probably easier to deal with than Perl.
Smalltalk is a lovely language, but it's not exactly commonplace, and it
is not really suitable for little scripts.

Craig

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