Lately, when I have a little time to kill, I try to pick up the basics of a scripting language that I haven’t used (or haven’t used very much) before. Earlier this week, I messed around a bit with Bash. I’m fairly familiar with it anyway, since I use that shell constantly, but I don’t often write full-blown scripts for it. Earlier tonight, I was flipping through a Windows 98 book a friend gave me and found a chapter on scripting Windows. So I experimented a bit with VBScript (and, wow, what an ugly language it is). Still, it’s good to know a bit of each, since I work around both Linux boxes and Windows desktop machines (I even learned a little AppleScript once upon a time, but I can’t really remember any of it). It’s suprising to me that, rather than creating a proprietary language, companies like MS and Apple don’t just enable something simple like Perl or Python to work on their machines by default. I suppose, now that Mac OS X is out there, you can use whatever you want. And there are Perl platforms that will run on Win32. But, by default, all you have is VBScript and Microsoft’s corruption of JavaScript (which, I suppose, was fairly corrupt in the first place). Lately I’ve also been learning a bit of ActionScript (Flash’s language, based on JavaScript) for a project at work. So it’s been a week of experimentation with new things.