I do most of my scripting in perl too. Python has always irked me.
Only semi-related: I recently switched from bash shell to fish. I should have don’t that years ago. Don’t know why I held on to bash so tight.
Comment on What are the recommended scripting languages for complex shell scripts beyond bash?
valen@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Unpopular opinion: I’m old school and would probably use perl.
ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world 7 months ago
catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
What do you like about fish? Have you tried zsh? I’m in the market for a new shell too.
ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I’m not the person to say anything about zsh vs. fish. I last tried zsh around 2008. Back then I decided to stick with bash over other shells. At the time (and for decades earlier) it was clear that sh was inadequate. So the Bourne Again Shell was (and still is) ubiquitous. Other shells fighting for user space seemed like the xkcd-927 problem.
Now, I’m basically seeing that if I’m stuck without my .bashrc file, installing fish gives me most of the niceties I like. It also gives me niceties that I wouldn’t have been able to do, like nice multi-lining. And while I personally find fi and esac charming, they are pretty dumb. And I certainly don’t miss the for-do-done construction.
I bet I would like zsh as much as fish, but I don’t have any motivation to try it.
fish looks at my path to highlight mistyped commands. It autocompletes on the fly and autocompletes with attention paid to the usage in your history. The coolest thing is that it parses man pages. That allows autocomplete to know the options of a command as long as it has a proper man page (which it just should).
profoundlynerdy@programming.dev 7 months ago
This is the correct answer. Perl is shell-like with support for advanced data structures and data parsing capabilities. Modern Perl is very slick, especially with the new object system.
NostraDavid@programming.dev 7 months ago
Perl or Raku?
profoundlynerdy@programming.dev 7 months ago
Both are good and they each have their uses.
Perl is very Unix-y, recent releases have a very good object system, and Perl is quite fast but the syntax can take some getting used to. CPAN is a huge database of Perl modules, you’ll likely find what you need module wise.
Raku is amazingly flexible and I like its object and type systems more than other languages. The only only down side is compared Perl is that Raku on the slow side, even Python is faster at the moment. Raku has a much more consistent syntax than Perl but the module ecosystem is nowhere near as big.
I’d say try both and use what seems to be the most optomal for whatever task you’re dealing with. Personally, I use both for quick scripts about equally with performance and module availability usually being the deciding factors.
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