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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: lisp scripts
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:15 -0000 (UTC)
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On Sun, 09 Feb 2025 11:07:43 -0500, Dan Espen wrote:

> I once spent a week converting a LOT of sed/awk to Perl. I turned a
> complicated mess into something any programmer could readily understand.
>  (And actually worked.)

I have pointed out several times that Perl does everything awk can do, at 
least as concisely, and a lot more besides. Which is why I never bothered 
to learn awk.

Some people get annoyed every time I say that.

> Now I'd use Python.

With Perl, I was never quite sure I fully understood what was going on. 
There was always some hint of magic lurking just behind the scenes. Also 
the core language ends up quite large, with all the built-in features 
packed into it.

(Those two characteristics are probably related.)

With Python, I always felt that I understood what I was doing. And I kept 
that feeling as I got into more complex features like descriptors and 
metaclasses. It is, for the most part, a language whose growth has been 
carefully managed, so that the language core remains compact and cohesive 
and yet remains an incredibly powerful base to build on (as the standard 
library demonstrates).