From: Bennett Todd (betrahul.net)
Date: Wed Jan 14 2004 - 09:15:51 CST

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Whew. That's an ambitious project. You're tackling some problems
I've tacked in radically different ways (e.g. strong software
packaging for enterprise system configuration management).

More power to you, we need new looks at hard problems.

I stand by my recommendation of Lua for some of those problems, it's
an exceedingly pleasing language to script --- doesn't look "alien"
to most folks --- and it's small and light and tight.

But some of your problems ("record" a session where a sysadmin
interactively does a job, abstracting it so you can automatically
"replay" it against other hosts in batch) you've urgently got to be
able to robustly manipulate your scripting code as data. For that,
there's one well-known clear winner: lisp. Depending on whether you
want to start with small/minimalist/clean/elegant and then build out
the features you need and want, or whether you want to start with
17 different kitchen sinks, one each in the favourite colours of
each programmer who ever washed a dish in his life, you want either
scheme or Common Lisp. The lisps unify code and data --- manipulate
wads of code as data --- like no other language ever. In fact, a
case could be made that that's the real, deep definition of a lisp.

-Bennett

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