I use several Linux flavors and know bash and html. What I am looking for is a general purpose language. Something with a gentle learning curve would be preferred. I have read about python and perl, but the words they use to describe them don't really mean a lot to me. I would greatly appreciate it if you would suggest a language and describe what it can do or why it is good in terms I can understand. Thanks.

Learn c.

Lots of tutorials are available to help with the initial part of the learning curve.

It works in every platform there are compilers for.

It is a general purpose language with the power to do everything a scripting language like Python and Perl can do and much more.

It is far more efficient, using less memory and far less processing resources/time to execute than scripting languages like Python and Perl.

c is basically an ancestor to many modern programming languages which makes learning it a great first step to learning many other languages in popular use today.

Thank you, I will try it.

I would recommend c++, it will still teach you the c side of things, and still let you do system programing in linux, but you will also have the object oriented features to use, which I find to be helpful and easier to use for general purpose programming.

Like said before, look at C++ in the first place. It is a lot bigger than C in terms of keywords, libraries etc. But start learn the basics. Why? C is not much like its successors, such as (c++), java, c# etc. Its a different paradigm. Many things in system programming anyway is text-processing, which perl and python do really well. C++ makes text processing easier while still features "backward compabilty" to c.

Try with Java


it's multiplataform, it's easy and powerfull