Hacker News Reader

There's no reason to use awk or sed when perl exists (a2p and s2p have existed for decades)

There is no reason to use perl in situation when awk kicks its butt with clearer, shorter code free of distracting sigils and other line noise

Awk is also POSIX standard; a good remaining reason to use it (if it is a feasible alternative for a task) is that a script has to be portable outside of GNU/Linux.

I like Perl a lot better than awk, buy I do agree with the general sentiment of using the language that makes for the clearest code for the task at hand, especially the smaller ones. Which makes me a frequent awk proponent.

So I'm surprised at the following part of your comment:

> There is no reason to use perl in situation when awk kicks its butt with clearer, shorter code free of distracting author and other line noise

In my experience, the shorter ask code tends to be the one with sigils.

But in a lot of ways awk seems way more modern than Perl (Perl 5 at least). You actually have functions with parameters rather than having a weird @_ array that you need to shift values from. Honestly, if I didn't know otherwise, I'd think awk came after Perl.

Functions with parameters in a () is already in Perl 5. Search for subroutine signatures.

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsub.html#Signatures

Reply on news.ycombinator.com