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

[Cliff Pratt]

Andrej wrote:
> 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.
> 
Awk is OK but even with sed and bash, it's not really up to the stuff
that is easily doable in Perl (or one of those other languages). A Perl 
RE is much more flexible than awk for parsing and processing log files, 
for example.
> 
> 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?
> 
Use java? Are you serious? A perl or even shell script can be hacked
around a lot easier than a java one.
> 
> 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. ;}
>