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A comment on Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim (2012). Parent comment

Re:Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim ... by dsturnbull2049 on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @12:32AM (#8100682)
Python and Ruby are just as bad as Perl for this. Python being the least fluent of the three for scripting.

If you want a proper language to support your scripting goals, then if you go right up to something like Ocaml or Haskell you'll skip all the pointless stringly-typed problems of perl/ruby/python.

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Re:Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim ... by klibertp on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @11:27AM (#8102720)
TCL, REBOL or Red - or maybe some kind of Lisp even - could be better than Python for scripting. There are probably other good languages for this, like maybe Io.

Haskell and OCaml and Java and C++ are about equally badly suited for the job. No, they don't make a good scripting languages. And they don't even want to. Why would anyone try to write shell scripts with them is really beyond me.

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Re:Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim ... by alayne on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @12:36AM (#8100698)
It's hard to take people seriously who suggest Haskell as a good language for general scripting. That's some powerful religion.
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Re:Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim ... by hderms on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @10:04AM (#8102259)
Yeah, "stringly-typed" isn't really a problem when you're mostly dealing with files made up of strings/lines. Interfacing between programs and files which output mostly idiosyncratic output over an interface of files and strings isn't really made any easier or more robust by using a heavy type system and functional purity...
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Re:Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim ... by owlish on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @12:46AM (#8100716)
Can you give an example where Haskell or Ocaml would be more appropriate than the scripting languages you mention?
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Re:Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim ... by laichzeit0 on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @12:55PM (#8103276)
You're in for a fun surprise if you ever do embedded linux software where a full python or ruby interpreter will either blow your flash space requirements, be too slow or simply unavailable. Perl is a way better option but even then might be too heavy. Busybox however will have a sed or awk.

These are tools that are not going away tomorrow just because something better exists.

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Re:Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim ... by Aloha on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @12:53AM (#8100726)
awk+sed, perl, and python are at least somewhat universal - ocaml and haskell are not. Heck, awk+sed even more so, any unix system almost no matter how old, or odd has some version of those two tools on them.
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