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Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

Second this. Perl replaced both awk and sed. Data scientists marvel at awk/sed but Perl is somehow forgotten. Perl May not be as suited to writing complex programs, but for text processing tasks, it is much more elegant than awk or sed.

Perl -pie is a very powerful idiom.

I would rather use a subset of Perl than awk.

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That's the first time I'm hearing Perl being praised for its elegance of all things. Elegance is certainly in the eye of the beholder, but by default is understood in the context of programming languages as "containing only a minimal amount of syntax constructs". By that measure, Perl is spectacularly/absurdly bad with its "sigills" and "there's more than one way" idioms. In fact, I find Perl one of the ugliest languages of all time.

Edit: a-ok, probably elegance is meant in the same sense that C is elegant by cramming everything in a single statement using pre-/post-increment operators and assignments-as-expressions

One has to recall that there were some forces that wanted Perl to become a standard shell rather than a programming language. A shell is usually more limited in features, but it is frequently very forgiving, provides many shortcuts, and there are often multiple ways of doing things.

However, I've never believed it to be possible to have a language both as a shell language and a proper programming language for large-scale projects. I believe the two usecases are fundamentally antithetical, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

> However, I've never believed it to be possible to have a language both as a shell language and a proper programming language for large-scale projects. I believe the two usecases are fundamentally antithetical, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

I'd say Powershell proves you right. Powershell has a great design, it has optional typing and access to a cornucopia of libraries via .NET.

Even so, they had to make some compromises because of the shell parts (functions return output, for example) which makes is quite finicky as a "proper" programming language.

On the shell side, the very nice nomenclature which makes it very readable and discoverable makes is annoying sometimes to use as a shell. That and the somewhat unwieldy launch of non-Powershell commands.

Someone who attempts to bridge the two has a ton of work to do, both in the research and in the implementation department. I guess Oil Shell (https://www.oilshell.org/) is the most realistic approach we have today. And it's probably still 1-2 years away from release and many more years from mass adoption (if that ever happens).

yeah.. I like the `s///` syntax in sed/perl than the `sub/gsub` syntax.. plus the regex is lacking in awk.. no backreference(gawk provides, but only in replacement section).. and perl has non-greedy, lookarounds, code in replacement section, etc

other nice features I'd like in awk is `tr` and `join`

Why add 'tr' and 'join' to awk when they exist on their own?

That's part of why people avoid perl. It's very capable, but that wide scope is counter to the unix philosophy that prefers simple, focused utilities that can be combined in pipelines.

looks like I didn't word it properly...

you could ask why have sub/gsub when there is sed... that's because you need that for specific field or string in addition to other processing.. similarly, having tr for specific string/field is useful..

I meant join as in perl's join - to construct a string out of array values with specified separator

Some examples:

* https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48920626/sort-rows-in-cs...

* https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45571828/execute-bash-co...

* https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48925359/sorting-groups-...

I think perls niche is sort of it's downfall. For example, I used to work at a company with 70% C, 25% shell script, and 5% perl. Any time I ran into a perl script I had to switch my brain into Perl mode, with the understanding that what I was working on would be just as good or better in C or shell. I had nothing against Perl as a language, but always enjoyed exorcising a perl script from the codebase.

Ah, but which subset?

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