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Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

Perl is shipped in virtually every Linux distribution; it's much closer to standard than, say, Node.

This is a big plus compared to Python. I dread installing Python for some project that needs it. Is it wheel, pip, pip3? pip3.7, apt install pip, poetry? Maybe pyenv? Good god what goes in my .bashrc? What in my PATH?

Also, on Perl:

Install cpanminus and then install local::lib.

cpanm local::lib

cat >> ~/.profile << EOF eval $(perl -I ~/perl5/lib/perl5/ -Mlocal::lib) EOF

done.

Please take a look at Carton too.

So is ed. That doesn’t mean it’s a better coding environment than modern IDEs, even though it’s far more “standard.”

Actually, line editors are really nice, and UNIX arguably makes a better IDE than any purpose-specific one.

To be clear, you program using ed and the command line instead of ever using an IDE? The said programming environment, you said 'line editors are nice'.

This is the same nonsense game people play where someone says "that's like taking a ship to cross the ocean instead of a plane" and someone else says "I like taking ships, I want to get fresh air for three weeks of solitude instead arriving the next morning"

I do for every language that isn't Common Lisp! I learned to program on a machine that had a copy of vi that refused to go into visual mode; instead of trying to fight it, I started using ed.

Everything about UNIX is oriented toward being a programming environment in itself. There are plenty of developers who just use UNIX as their IDE. Drew DeVault, as an example, is pretty notorious for it.

Complexity distracts and makes efficiency impossible. Modern IDEs are nothing but complexity. UNIX-as-IDE simplifies.

Confirms that the brain is incredibly plastic.

It can learn to compensate for a missing tool, arm, eye, ...

And after a while it feels just natural.

UNIX has all of the tools, and unlike IDEs, it allows you to seamlessly add them on. UNIX is more "cybernetic enhancement" to the IDE's "prosthetic limb."

ed is actually really useful if you're wanting to rapidly iterate on a program. There's a reason Ken Thompson advocated for it up to his retirement (which was very recently, mind).

- ed/nvi

- bc|dc/perl/little of C

- Gnuplot

- entr + make

Amazing performance with very little usage of resources.

Or Fortran, ironically.

This is mostly because of the compiler situation. Intel forbids redistribution of theirs, and GNU's isn't up to snuff, which continues to handicap the language.

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