[prog] Programming for QA folks

[Anna Baik]

Wow.  I wasn't expecting quite such a wealth of information to come
flooding out of what has been a fairly quiet list recently.  I'm going
to go through in a bit (actually, looking at the time, probably
tomorrow!) and answer various questions, though given that
conversations have moved on without me probably not all of them - but
first wanted to say thank you so much to everyone who's responded!  I
have a lot of things to investigate and think over now.  This is
great!

In summary, having just read through everything, it seems that:

Python is much loved and highly recommended especially for its
friendliness to first time programmers.   Which would be fabulous if
it was an option but sadly it isn't.  It was already on my "I must
play with this some time" list, but now it's moved up quite a bit!

Shell script also comes in very handy for some folks, and may have
less of a learning curve.

However, Perl has a) various things that make producing good
documentation easier and b) test frameworks!   This is really such a
hugely important thing that it might well be worth some initial pain.
I wasn't aware of TAP at all before this, so this is a huge bonus.


thanks,
Anna