5 ms·

Using python and constraining yourself to only use a basic subset of the standard library modules so you can run the script in pretty much any environment is al

• isbvhodnvemrwvn 2y ago
  I would agree if python dependency management wasn't a dumpster fire.
  • rendaw 2y ago
    I think the point GP was making was that you restrict yourself to only the bundled standard library, which covers most of the basics needed for scripting.
  • qz_kb 2y ago
    This is why you force yourself to use nearly zero dependencies. The standard library sys, os, subprocess, and argparse modules should be all you need to do all the fancy stuff you might try with bash, and have extremely high compatibility with any python3.x install.
  • guappa 2y ago
    And it's a dumpster fire because they refuse to make any decision and decide which is the supported way. Instead they removed distutils, so now there is no way to install any module without using a 3rd party installer.
• rendaw 2y ago
  I agree, but I've been having a hard time even with python recently. I had a small script (50-100 lines) to format a data drive on boot I refactored, 3 or 4 obvious undeclared variables and who knows how many more I didn't notice - mypy found 0 issues. I was looking up statically typed alternatives and stumbled upon Ammonite and Scala-CLI for scala. I haven't used them much, but Ammonite bundles some basic libraries including command line parsing, http, and json, which are probably 99% of what I used in Python too? And Scala seems like an interesting language too with decent editor integration.
  • macrael 2y ago
    use mypy!
    • cinntaile 2y ago
      > mypy found 0 issues It didn't help him. Which is a bit strange?
      • ok_dad 2y ago
        To make mypy strict enough to compare your dev experience to a typed language, you have to declare all sorts of configurations, otherwise there are huge swaths of things it’ll allow compared to most typed languages. I use below, and only when necessary use ignore comment pragmas when third party libraries are not typed. #? message format settings show_column_numbers = true show_error_codes = true #? strictness settings disallow_any_unimported = true disallow_any_expr = true disallow_any_decorated = true disallow_any_explicit = true disallow_any_generics = true disallow_subclassing_any = true disallow_untyped_calls = true disallow_untyped_defs = true disallow_incomplete_defs = true disallow_untyped_decorators = true no_implicit_optional = true warn_redundant_casts = true warn_unused_ignores = true warn_return_any = true warn_unreachable = true strict_equality = true strict = true
  • wiseowise 2y ago
    > I had a small script (50-100 lines) to format a data drive on boot I refactored, 3 or 4 obvious undeclared variables and who knows how many more I didn't notice - mypy found 0 issues. What does pyright/pylance say?
• NegativeLatency 2y ago
  Had decent luck using chatgpt to translate some crufty old bash deploy scripts to python
• aulin 2y ago
  Choice is a privilege you rarely have in a day to day job. Bash most of the time is already there and you have to live with it. Also, I've been forced to work on a huge SCons based project and I guarantee python can make your life quite miserable when used for something it's not supposed to.
  • qz_kb 2y ago
    I'm not suggesting you build a a whole build system with python (which is basically bazel and it seems to be good enough for google.) A lot of originally little automation/dev scripts bloat into more complicated things as edge cases are bolted on and bash scripts become abominations in these cases almost immediately.
• guappa 2y ago
  > Using python and constraining yourself to only use a basic subset of the standard library modules Used to be a viable strategy until they started to drop modules from the standard library at every single release.
  • yawpitch 2y ago
    > Used to be a viable strategy until they started to drop modules from the standard library at every single release. That’s a bit of a ridiculous statement, there’s a small number of very-long deprecated modules removed in 3.12, and some more recently deprecated modules in 3.13. And these things are old, largely or completely unmaintained, and usually complete obsolete. I’d be surprised if anyone has a script that’s been adversely effected by this, and if they did it’s because they stopped maintaining it years ago (and also chose to both silence warnings and upgrade interpreter versions without reading the release notes).
    • guappa 2y ago
      > largely or completely unmaintained Consider that the python foundation absolutely has the resources to put a developer to maintain them. If they don't is because they don't want to. > and usually complete obsolete The amount of modules I've had to patch to keep working on 3.12 tells me they aren't as obscure and unused as you think they are. > I’d be surprised if anyone has a script that’s been adversely effected by this I'd say that over 99.9999% of python users do not download python from python.org. They use whatever is on their system. Which means that updating an LTS distribution will create mayhem. And that's considering that most modules have already been patched by the distribution maintainers to fix all the brokenness introduced by the new python version. Also, a bash script from 30 years ago still works fine. A python script from 5 years ago doesn't start.
      • yawpitch 2y ago
        >Consider that the python foundation absolutely has the resources to put a developer to maintain them. The resources to pay someone doesn’t mean that someone with interest and knowledge exists, especially for modules that were formally deprecated in Python 2 and which will never be reinstated. Lots of this stuff is just cruft, most of which has an obvious replacement, and if it doesn’t there’s a decent chance it’s not been used in years by anyone and if it ever had a reason to be in the standard lib, that reason is long gone. > The amount of modules I've had to patch to keep working on 3.12 tells me they aren't as obscure and unused as you think they are. If that number is at all significant, where are the issues pushing back against deprecation and removal? It’s not like there hasn’t been a formal process for all these modules. What got deleted in 3.12 was well documented and easily caught just by catching DeprecationWarning… anyone getting surprised by these modules going missing isn’t doing due diligence. > I'd say that over 99.9999% of python users do not download python from python.org. They use whatever is on their system. Which means that updating an LTS distribution will create mayhem. And I’ll pretty much guarantee you that 99.9999% of those users haven’t heard of, much less imported, any of the modules that have been removed. > And that's considering that most modules have already been patched by the distribution maintainers to fix all the brokenness introduced by the new python version. But again where are the issues and hands being waved that these issues are wide-spread enough to halt or reverse the deprecation process? If distro maintainers are simply patching everything for users who are constantly advised to leave their system Python alone and they’re not reporting the issues then those distro maintainers are harming everyone. > Also, a bash script from 30 years ago still works fine. A python script from 5 years ago doesn't start. I’ve written plenty of Python scripts that are still running on the interpreter and stdlib they were authored for, decades later. I’m also keenly aware that most of those scripts could not be written in Bash without reimplementing a significant portion of the Python standard lib and ecosystem, none of which was materially affected by the 3.11>3.12 removals.
• runjake 2y ago
  As a person who’s been doing shell programming for 35 years and Python for 15 years, I completely disagree. Bash scripts and Bash control flow has been and is used in highly critical scripts all over the place, including other planets. We’ve been writing reliable, well-designed scripts for many decades. Some of my scripts are several hundred lines long and older than the system engineers currently occupying their positions. Python is fine too. Use the right tool for the right job.
• udev4096 2y ago
  Bash is native. You won't find python pre-installed on all distros, like alpine
  • yawpitch 2y ago
    True, though there’s a whole world of people who will yell at you for using Bash-isms rather than pure posix precisely because Bash (at least up to date versions) isn’t everywhere either.
  • hi_hi 2y ago
    Bash may be native, but alot of the programs you'll want to call may not be, or will differ between platforms in subtle ways. Although this won't be a concern for small/trivial scripts, but if we're talking about python as an alternative, my point probably still applies.
    • a-french-anon 2y ago
      This. People using bash extensions and util-linux as if they're standard are my bane. If you can't do it in POSIX (sh and utilities) and don't want to do an extensive investigation of portability for what you need, pony up for Python/Tcl/Perl (all in MacOS base, by the way).
  • lloeki 2y ago
    > You won't find python pre-installed on all distros, like alpine The same can be said of bash, especially since you mention Alpine (also FreeBSD) Perl, though... ;) (if Perl is not there it gets pulled in very quickly as a dependency of something, e.g typically you pull git, you get perl)
• mazambazz 2y ago
  Hard disagree. I've written plenty in both. They both have their strengths, but bash is just more efficient if you're working with the filesystem. The UNIX philosophy of "do one thing and do it well" shines here. Python is more powerful but it's a double-edged sword. If I want to read a file containing API endpoints, send a request to them for some JSON, and do some parsing, I don't want to need or want to deal with importing modules, opening file objects, using dictionaries, methods, functions, etc. Why do that when I can literally just ``` N=0 while read -r URL; do curl "$URL" | jq '.data[].someProp' | grep -v "filter" > "$N.data" N="$((N+1))" done < ./links.txt ``` The other thing is bash makes it exceptionally easier to integrate across different system tools. Need to grab something from a remote with `rsync`, edit some exif, upload it to a CDN? That's 3 commands in a row, versus god knows what libraries, objects, and methods you need to deal with in Python.
  • qz_kb 2y ago
    now add error handling.
    • ryapric 2y ago
      That's really not that hard to add above. A lot of folks act like it's impossible to handle errors etc. in bash, but it's pretty straightforward -- certainly no more difficult than in any other language. The hard part, like with all languages, is deciding how to handle errors cases. The rest is just code.
      • wiseowise 2y ago
        > That's really not that hard to add above. Then show how it is going to look like?
        • ryapric 2y ago
          On mobile so no idea if this a) looks good or b) runs (especially considering the command substitutions, but you could also redirect to temp files instead), but it's just something like this: N=0 while read -r URL; do data="$(curl "$URL")" || { printf 'error fetching data\n' && exit 1 ; } prop="$(jq '.data[].someProp' <<< "$data" || { printf 'error parsing JSON response\n' && exit 1 ; } grep -v "filter" <<< "$prop" > "$N.data" || { printf 'error searching for filter text\n' && exit 1 ; } N="$((N+1))" done < ./links.txt bash also has e.g. functions, so you could abstract that error handling out. Like I said, not that weird. Edit: oh good, at least the formatting looks ok.