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> I can't tell you how often one of my team shows me some clever, non-trivial Python script that I solve in a couple of lines of awk/sed/perl I see you have de

> I can't tell you how often one of my team shows me some clever, non-trivial Python script that I solve in a couple of lines of awk/sed/perl I see you have decades of experience with those tools (awk/sed/perl), so they are second nature to you. I can sortof help my way through them but I find them very cryptic and hacky. The information density is very high, lots of implicit things happening, many abbreviations and symbols. It tenses my mind up. It heavily depends on what you "grew up" on. I've been using Python for about 15 years now and when I switch to Python, I can feel the freedom to express things in a straightforward way without worrying about edge cases or cryptic syntax. Line by line it just does what it says, in English words. A few lines of list comprehensions .split(), sum() etc. can do a lot while still being crystal clear. In so many cases I've had some issue with Bash / Unix tools, looked on StackOverflow, found high activity questions with many answers that boil down "well, it's not really possible in a simple way" and then some hacky workaround that nobody would understand later unless I link to the SO page as a comment. Now sure, sed, grep, awk etc. all have their uses, but for me that ends at about 100-150 characters or perhaps a bit longer ones for one-off use. Anything longer or for permanent use, I find it clearer to write it out explicitly in Python. After this, suddenly lots of powerful ways of extending it open up, which would be horribly cryptic and convoluted with the Unix tools.

kjs3 7y ago
I get it. And I don't disagree, per se. I confess to writing way too many baroque shell scripts that should have been Python or some such, and a couple of mission-critical awk scripts that were way longer and outside the appropriate use case than they should have been. You can really go down a rabbit hole there. But haters (kidding) should really understand what they can do with a couple of hundred characters of sed, awk, perl, etc. before they discount them. And if it's "not really possible in a simple way", that's pretty much a good indication that they need to do it in Python, Ruby, etc. It's not either-or, black-or-white. But

kjs3 7y ago

I get it. And I don't disagree, per se. I confess to writing way too many baroque shell scripts that should have been Python or some such, and a couple of mission-critical awk scripts that were way longer and outside the appropriate use case than they should have been. You can really go down a rabbit hole there. But haters (kidding) should really understand what they can do with a couple of hundred characters of sed, awk, perl, etc. before they discount them. And if it's "not really possible in a simple way", that's pretty much a good indication that they need to do it in Python, Ruby, etc. It's not either-or, black-or-white. But