Why I don’t worry about Python losing users | Hacker News Reader

Why I don’t worry about Python losing users

nothingbutsnark.svbtle.com

19 pointsctoth13 comments

The described issue is even simpler in shell scripting:

  cat file1.txt file2.txt | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq > whitelist.txt

Does this mean people aren't going to move from shell scripting to other languages? No, it just means the task is particularly suited to scripting like this, and Python has affordances for scripting.

This article is evidence that more people need to invest some time in learning shell scripting.

Your solution doesn't do the same thing, though. His code doesn't sort.

Sure it does: https://gist.github.com/brettcannon/82c4fe68bac30f4ed653#fil...

Sorry, you are right, I missed that.

Arguably your solution is still different because you sort the input instead of the output, but that's unlikely to matter here.

The only difference is I sort before uniquing, but the python code uniques before sorting. But the result is identical (and in shell scripting, you can't unique without sorting first).

Although FWIW I just checked and the `sort` tool actually has a flag for uniquing during the sort. I don't know if that's portable though.

Yes. Pedantically speaking his solution may be faster for the pathological case of the input consisting almost entirely of duplicates.

It can actually be even simpler:

  sort -u file1.txt file2.txt | tr A-Z a-z > whitelist.txt

You need the -f flag to sort as well to ignore case during the sorting. I don't know how portable the flags to sort are though which is why I didn't bother using them.

Ten lines of Python? That's a one-liner in Perl, and not one of those over-long ones. So I'd be careful about using that as proof that your language is safe from encroachment.

Really, the time that people start posting "Why Language X Isn't Dying" is about the time you should consider freshening your tech skills to a new language, in my experience.

You could also do it in one line:

   cat file1 file2 | awk '!_[tolower($0)]++{ gsub(/^[ \t]+|[ \t]+$/, ""); print}'

Does that mean awk doesn't have to worry either?

I wouldn't say it's a fair comparison on the amount of code as no exception handling at all was done in Python, where several ifs where used in Go...

I'd like to think Python has more going for it than being a bad Perl

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