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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not exactly sure why I started reaching for Python instead.

Oh, I am quite sure. Looks like Perl6 changed that, but it's because I was never sure that data structure should be a reference to a dictionary of references to scalars, or a dictionary of scalars, or a dictionary of reference to scalars, or a reference to a dictionary of scalars.

Anyway, next time I go for a quick script, I should go for Haskell, not Python, nor Perl (5 or 6, whatever). But I will probably go for Python, because it's painless enough and I don't know Haskell's shell integration by hearth. Anyway I will go for Haskell before I try Perl6, what is a nice measure of the problem they have to get mainstream again, because the language varies, but I'm far from the only person thinking this way.

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> Anyway, next time I go for a quick script, I should go for Haskell, not Python, nor Perl (5 or 6, whatever). But I will probably go for Python, because it's painless enough and I don't know Haskell's shell integration by hearth.

I've started using rust for short scripting tasks, helps me get acquainted with the stdlib & ecosystem, and `cargo script` works really neatly, seamlessly allowing adding dependencies to a single-file script with not issue. Plus if you want to scale the script out to a proper project you can just take and promote the generated cargo project.

Yeah, I've had a similar experience in Scala-land. Spinning up a JVM to run a small script feels icky, but it's actually well worth it for the sake of not switching languages.

The kind of quick scripts I use Perl for involve picking interesting bits out of text files. Honest question: Would you use Haskell for that? If so, why? And how?

I'm with you here. It's not that Haskell isn't a good language, but that scripting languages are really good at scripting :)

Haskell does have a good REPL and being able to distribute a binary when finished is really nice.

You can also run Haskell in interpreted mode, so it is actually a viable choice for scripting.

It's viable, but certainly not designed for that sort of thing like Perl, Python, Powershell, Awk, & Bash. Many of those languages have built in niceties for scripting such as Perl's myriad of command line switches and well, everything about Powershell. They're optimized for shorter programs where Haskell is optimized for helping you write higher quality code.

Try the turtle library, after using it it would certainly feel for you like it was designed for scripting, it’s such a joy to use!

Are you kidding? Haskell is the language for picking stuff out of text files. Unless Perl got a complete transformation on the 5 to 6 change, it isn't even on the same league.

You could argue that Perl 6's grammars are a complete transformation. Please see https://docs.perl6.org/language/grammar_tutorial for more information. Note that Perl 6's grammars are used to parse Perl 6 code itself, so it's powerful enough to build complete language compilers out of.

Cool, Perl6 gained a native context-free parser. Yeah, that gets it in the league, I would have to compare it with Python parser libraries to decide what's better.

But not, Haskell and Prolog are still leaders here, with Haskell currently having the lead.

Could you be a bit more specific about what makes Haskell the language for this? I'm not sure it's going to be more comprehensible than Perl, for those who don't write Haskell full-time. I'm not sure it's going to be easier to read through the lines of an input file than it is in Perl, and I'm not sure it's going to be easier to apply regexes to lines than it is in Perl.

Is one of those assumptions wrong? Can you state why it's wrong?

Or do I need to adjust my sarcasm detector?

If it's not already on your radar, you should have a look at the Shelly library on Hackage.

Oh, I know about it. And it looks great.

It's basically the reason the next language I'll try on the shell is Haskell. But it takes looking at the documentation, so I'll leave it to try when I'm not in a rush. For shell scripting, that may take a long time.

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