> The author is 100% correct on everything. Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason.

What are you trying to do?

Say I'm Santa and have a list of names in "naughtynice.lst", in the format

  Joey Bloggs,train,nice
  Johnny Doe,car,naughty
  Mary Lamb,car,nice

etc

I can get my shopping list by simply creating a file on my machine

  my $i = 0;
  my $toys = {};
  my $coal = 0;
  while (<>) {
    chomp;
    my ($name, $toy, $nice) = split(/,/);
    if ($nice eq "nice") {
        $toys->{$toy}++;
    } else {
        $coal = $coal++;
    }
  }
  
  print "$_: ".$toys->{$_}."\n" foreach keys (%{$toys});
  print "coal: $coal\n";

and then typing

  perl test.pl naughtnice.lst 

to run it. Python I assume is similar. I'm fairly sure that OSX comes with perl, python and bash if nothing else.

Now you could say that you don't like the syntax of perl, or python, or basic, or java, but actually knocking up a quick program and running is no harder than writing that same code in some hidden part of excel