Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

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Perl as a scripting language remains undefeated. As in, let's say you are considering Awk for some task. It's probably worth learning how to do that task in Perl instead. The same applies to many classic uses of bash scripts: today, the biggest reason to choose to write a shell script is to provide some service which will be universally available on plausible platforms, and Perl isn't that ubiquitous any longer. But for most of what shell scripting was intended for, Perl is a more powerful and less, let's say idiosyncratic, choice.

Of course, with a bit more verbosity, any such script could be written in Python. Perl was designed to fit this exact niche, so it has a bunch of small affordances for doing script munging eloquently (not to say elegantly!) but Python, or Ruby for that matter, can also get the job done. Most people who know either of those languages thoroughly would pick what they know: they'll do the job, and that spares learning another language, which is indeed a quirky one.

But for those who do know Perl, it remains a very good fit for a Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. For those who do a lot of 'scripting' tasks in the original sense, it's worth learning imho.

Except, I know how to slice and dice text with awk, and can do it without leaning on ChatGPT or studying language documentation. Never made the leap to perl, the few times I tried I was put off because to a newbie the language looks like gibberish.

I would never consider perl for anything new in 2024. I still use awk very regularly.

> Except, I know how to slice and dice text with awk

I meant to say something more like "if you need to learn awk to do it, you may as well learn Perl instead". I figured from context that if you're "considering using awk", you don't know it, or you'd be "using awk". But no matter.

Perl can do everything Awk can, at least as well if not better. As fiddly, arbitrary, and limited, as Awk is, it's a lot less language, and that does come with advantages.

But I know from experience that you can learn the Awk subset of Perl as easily as you can learn Awk, and then you have a basis for extension to more tasks of a similar nature. If you want to see what I mean, there's a utility a2p[0] which translates Awk to Perl, this suffers slightly from machine translation, but it's a good demonstration that Perl can do everything Awk can in not just a trivial sense, but in the sense that it's designed to make Awk unnecessary.

So if you can get over whatever aesthetic hangup you have about Perlian line noise, you might discover you like it. Anyone using Awk "very regularly" is leaving a lot of potential on the table by refusing to learn Perl. Then again, sometimes it's best to stick with what you know.

[0] https://perldoc.perl.org/5.8.6/a2p

I've started to write my one off scripts with an AI prompt, and Python as a simpler and more verbose language with a bigger training corpus is easier for that. Or I ask for a bash script! Still writing my one liners in Perl but they're getting shorter and shorter.

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