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I'm also a developer who still does sysadmin on the side (and probably far too much for my liking!) and I always write my scripts in Perl or bash. And from wha

I'm also a developer who still does sysadmin on the side (and probably far too much for my liking!) and I always write my scripts in Perl or bash. And from what i've seen and anecdotally this still seems to be the common case (Java & Perl are the main languages used by companies in the City of London).

kamaal 15y ago
Actually nothing ever truly replaces those classic tools bash/awk/sed/perl. But every now and then you will see <insert some new tool> being compared with a <insert classic tool>. And then told since the <insert some new tool> is a little famous now, its likely to replace the <insert classic tool> and that <quote some irrelevant search engine statistic> actually proves <insert classic tool> is dead and <insert some new tool> is actually going to replace the <insert classic tool> in the future. Then suddenly expect a stream of tweets, blog posts and forum discussions on how useless <insert classic tool is>. Please replace <insert classic tool> by "Perl","SQL","Php". Please replace <insert some new tool> by "Python","Ruby","Tcl","NoSQL","Django".. Please replace <quote some irrelevant search engine statistic> by Google search stats or Tiobe(Which is the same ,but presented differently metric).
- draegtun 15y ago
  Totally agree. While it's good to always review your tools & skills... spending lots of time looking at sparkling new things could be better focused on i) getting work done or ii) improving your proficiency with current tools :)
- ccashell 15y ago
  Well said. Sometimes a new tool will come along that truly is a huge improvement on previous tools. But, when those previous tools are "classics", it's pretty rare that the "new" tool is truly that much of an improvement. There's a reason that these things (bash, sed, awk, perl, SQL, Unix/Linux, etc) are still popular and still going. It's because they're time tested, they're well known, and they work.

kamaal 15y ago

Actually nothing ever truly replaces those classic tools bash/awk/sed/perl. But every now and then you will see <insert some new tool> being compared with a <insert classic tool>. And then told since the <insert some new tool> is a little famous now, its likely to replace the <insert classic tool> and that <quote some irrelevant search engine statistic> actually proves <insert classic tool> is dead and <insert some new tool> is actually going to replace the <insert classic tool> in the future. Then suddenly expect a stream of tweets, blog posts and forum discussions on how useless <insert classic tool is>. Please replace <insert classic tool> by "Perl","SQL","Php". Please replace <insert some new tool> by "Python","Ruby","Tcl","NoSQL","Django".. Please replace <quote some irrelevant search engine statistic> by Google search stats or Tiobe(Which is the same ,but presented differently metric).

draegtun 15y ago
Totally agree. While it's good to always review your tools & skills... spending lots of time looking at sparkling new things could be better focused on i) getting work done or ii) improving your proficiency with current tools :)
ccashell 15y ago
Well said. Sometimes a new tool will come along that truly is a huge improvement on previous tools. But, when those previous tools are "classics", it's pretty rare that the "new" tool is truly that much of an improvement. There's a reason that these things (bash, sed, awk, perl, SQL, Unix/Linux, etc) are still popular and still going. It's because they're time tested, they're well known, and they work.