perl to python

[Ville Vainio]

>>>>> "Roy" == Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> writes:

    Roy> Anyway, I think there's a lot of value in learning tools like
    Roy> grep and sed, and using them when appropriate.  The example

I tend to think pretty much the opposite. Most of the time you can do
things as easily with Python, with the added advantage of robust
exception handling (errors not passing silently) and not having to
learn the other things. You only need to know one regexp
syntax. Windows can also be quite unpredictable w/ customary Unix
tools. Cygwin has burned me a few times too many.

The things you usually do with the non-python tools are trivial, and
trivial things have the habit of being, well, trivial in Python too.

    Roy> does best.  Sure, you can make a general-purpose tool like
    Roy> Python do that job, but other than proving that you can do
    Roy> it, I don't see any reason to bother.

You can always implement modules to do the tasks you normally use sed
or awk for. I never saw much virtue in using the most specialized (or
crippled, if you wish) tool possible. Not even if it's "optimized" for
the thing. Actually, I tend to think that Python has to some extent
deprecated that part of the Unix tradition.

It's funny, but somehow I can't really think of cases that a
specialized language would do better (ignoring the performace, which
is rarely a concern in sysadmin tasks) than Python with some
modules. Specialized languages were great at time when the general
purpose languages sucked, but that's not the case anymore.

And yes, I'm aware that I'm exposing myself to some serious flammage
from "if it was good enough for my grandad, it's good enough for me"
*nix crowd. Emotional attachment to various cute little tools is
understandable, but sometimes it's good to take a fresh perspective
and just let go.

-- 
Ville Vainio   http://tinyurl.com/2prnb