holy war (was: Re: [NCLUG] speaking of high school)

[mike cullerton]

on 2/13/01 11:20 AM, Mike Loseke at mike at verinet.com wrote:
> Thus spake mike cullerton:
>> anyway, i'm wondering if there are standard (good) ways of generating
>> random passwords out there.
> 
> For something like this I would do something simple: generate a variable
> length string of random characters of mixed case with some numbers and
> special characters thrown in for good measure.

thanks mike. this is the sort of thing i was considering.

now, to start a holy war :)

i am new to this programming thing. as many of you know, my background is
networking, so i've been around programming, and as a math major in college,
i was required to take some cs classes, so i understand a lot of the general
mentality. [with a sentence like that, i obviously wasn't an english major]

anyway, one of the things i'm learning is an application of the 'best tool
for the job' law. as a mechanic, i learned to appreciate tools, and more
particularly, the right tool for the job. the same could be said for tools
in the kitchen, the garden, whatever.

php is great for creating dynamic web content based on entries in a
database. it's also been great in that it's easy to learn and use. so,
someone like me who is new to programming can pick it up quick and focus on
other areas like general programming theory and technique.

while a network guy, i did a little perl scripting and got a feel for some
of what its strengths and weaknesses are. my feeling is that perl (because
of its comparative age to PHP) is more evolved and can 'do more stuff' like
for my particular problem pull a random item from an array. i don't know if
php can even do this. i couldn't find any reference to it in any php docs,
while researching this, but i did find a reference to it in some perl docs i
looked at.

and there's also python which i know nothing about.

so, do y'all find something you like (perl, python, whatever) and usually
stick with it and learn it well? do you try to find the right tool for the
job and work on each project independently from another? do you maybe mix
and match and for instance write a simple perl script to generate a random
password and call it from within my php program?

thanks,
mike

 -- mike cullerton