[wellylug] Help in finding a good technical/Linux related bookstore

[Andrej]

On Wednesday 13 June 2007 17:45, nic wrote:
> Do you have some specific application where you feel detailed
> knowledge of awk and sed is necessary?

> At risk of starting a flame war, I'd suggest that the time for
> needing a lot of detailed knowledge of things like awk and sed
> has passed, and that if you need to do anything remotely
> complex, then it's almost certainly easier and quicker to do
> in Python. I don't know enough to say whether Ruby is good for
> the scripting area, but if so, then that could be a contender
> too.
For instance if the machine were to run many of the tasks
that were to be scripted.  Each invocation of the python
interpreter will cost you more RAM than awk or sed will.  If 
the task can be done in awk or sed there's no good reason 
to choose the heavy weight alternatives.  Sure, I am happy 
to use perl; but some tasks are simple enough to be accomplished
in awk (with a ~ 300K memory footprint) or sed (take off another
100K?) rather than python or perl (~ 6M footprint on both
accounts), and with less CPU overhead as well.

You're saying that todays hardware can tackle all that? True,
but then, just use java ... oh, python can do the same things
and is as portable?  Well, almost, yah: but how much demand 
is there for python programmers in the wild?

I feel that all of the unix/linux tools still have their place,
and needn't be cast aside just because you think one tool
can do it all ... after all, the "many little well written
programs, glued together" is the paradigm of Unix/Linux.
Take that away - might as well use windows and create
a monolithic app for each task (interpreted language or not).

Not to "know your roots" is a sin. ;}

Flames to /dev/null, just as in the original mail.

> Cheers
>
> Nic C-L
Cheers,
Andrej