5 ms·
I believe you are missing the point. It's not about sed and awk. It's the string oriented approach to data requiring heavy usage of these tools for parsing the
by feldrim 3y ago
I believe you are missing the point. It's not about sed and awk. It's the string oriented approach to data requiring heavy usage of these tools for parsing the unstructured text.
The suggested alternative is the object oriented approach, just like PowerShell and the OP's project are based on.
- geophile 3y agoWell there are two points. 1) Piping strings is dumb. 2) Multiple incompatible sublanguages has a long learning curve. How many people can just write complex awk/find scripts without checking the manual? Using marcel, and knowing python, I can do those complex things without RTFM.
- mgaunard 3y agoI use bash, find, sed and awk every day, usually ten to twenty times per day. I've also built a lot of scripts for my company's workflow with those tools. I've never read the manual for any of these. They all work on the same concept of lines and words, which is intuitive and easy to interact with on the terminal. Piping strings and making lines and words the units of work are the great ideas of UNIX. I sometimes use python instead, but while it yields better programs, it takes a lot more time and just isn't suited to being written in the shell, especially with the syntax being whitespace-sensitive.
- geophile 3y agoYes. They work with lines and words, but the sublanguages are hideous.
- mgaunard 3y agobut it is structured, you have multiple lines and each line has multiple words.