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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

Though I have to reach the heights of that formula, I keep coming back to Excel for the same reason that I come back to Perl. Not because it's always the best tool for the job, but because it's the lingua franca in many contexts. If I create the thing in Excel, then I know I can hand it off to someone else and they will both know how to run it, and, in a pinch, how to change it.

With any other tool, there would eventually be an onboarding process not just for the thing I built, but also for the tool I built it in. Not with Excel – that will just run, whereever you go.

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> I can hand it off to someone else and they will both know how to run it, and, in a pinch, how to change it

How to change it, yes. How to get the correct result, probably not.

But well, they will get a result. Many people are satisfied with that.

Just send management a docker compose that will auto deploy your perl script!

It's too bad that browsers don't have a better story for local development. For reasonable reasons the browser has always been internet focused but it's the one thing that everyone has and runs anywhere these days. But if you try to write some quick JS/HTML thing it won't work when you point your browser at the file.

> then I know I can hand it off to someone else and they will both know how to run it, and, in a pinch, how to change it.

I'm not sure a receptive t will be able to successfully edit a spread sheet. So easy, to get interdependency between cells to a degree that it is really hard to follow, if you didn't create it yourself.

Or did I just describe Perl? Not sure.

Where is Perl the lingua franca?

The nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, deep under the waves, far from the glare of the yellow sun.

>> The nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, deep under the waves, far from the glare of the yellow sun.

No. That is not Perl. That is C Recursion: https://www.bobhobbs.com/files/kr_lovecraft.html

Perl is preinstalled on pretty much every Linux and MacOS since time immemorial, and it's pretty much guaranteed to stay preinstalled for the foreseeable future.

Python3 is up and coming, and eventually it will get there, but old machines must die before it can reach ubiquity.

> Perl is preinstalled on pretty much every Linux and MacOS since time immemorial

awk, bc, and sh are POSIX base utilities, they are literally preinstalled on every unix derivative.

That doesn't make them linga franca, which is what Scarbutt was asking about.

Hell, ed is a POSIX base utility. Does that make ed's command mode the linga franca of text manipulation? Of course not, the thought is preposterous.

Is not this actually a famous advantage of vim/vi in old editor war?

Yes?

That it is an advantage does not naturally and unfailingly translate into being a linga Franca.

It's the other way around.

"vi" being so common (ie. "lingua franca") is what gave it an advantage.

Then what would, in your opinion, make it "lingua franca"?

I took it to mean "so common that it's available almost anywhere" (which is consistent with the context of the comment).

I've found it extremely useful to rely in tools such as the ones you just listed. Specially because they are often present even in light vms were perl might not.

I don't find it preposterous at all.

Yes, I would consider awk and sh lingua francae (?) alongside Perl – but in slightly different contexts, namely low-complexity jobs.

I find Perl slightly more suitable once things get a little complicated, mainly because it's footgun:power ratio is better than awk (few footguns, but also very low power) and sh (many footguns, not that powerful).

I have come across plenty of boxen where bc was not installed, so I don't put that in that bucket.

And yes, if I want to describe text changes in a highly portable way, I will use sed (or ed, depending on context) rather than, say, unified diffs. I could accept an argument that unified diffs are also a lingua franca for more complicated changes, but they are harder to write.

It will be a long time before it makes sense to use python where longevity/portability matter.

Python breaks backwards compatibility with old scripts every six months or so. In practice, this means you have to port scripts every time you switch machines. Virtual environments sometimes address this issue, but they are hit or miss.

In contrast, perl scripts from 1999 often work unchanged on clean 2022 OS installs.

Is there even such a thing as lingua franca in any given field?

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