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Comment by jsyolo | Hacker News Reader

Not being snarky, why not python over perl? what makes perl better for scripts?

Perl is much more terse for one-liners and has much more built-in for doing text processing in scripts. Stuff like implicit read loop, field separation, etc. I would say they're suitable for different jobs: if a perl script grows beyond a hundred lines (you can do a surprising amount in that space!), then Python may be the right tool.

Perl is also much more of a known target: some version of it exists on basically every single Unix, and the language really hasn't changed that much in the past decade. I have SSH'ed into multiple CentOS 6/SLES 11 (released 2009, and granted mostly to rescue data off them) servers in the past 2 years, and perl is just much more of a known target to write things against than whatever python release is on that system.

what makes perl better for scripts?

Having an implicit line- and field-splitting loop for standard input with a couple of command-line switches. (Awk doesn't even need switches, but is cumbersome if you need initial state.) This covers a lot of use-cases. Also, very compact and powerful regular expressions.

Perl is a progression of that particular environment. It is a superset of shell/grep/awk/sed.

A shell command works exactly as you would expect copied literally inside a backquote. With all the other goodies of a real programming langauge.

Doing this in Python (to me atleast) seems unnatural.

By the time you figure out which env you need to be using with python, you’ll forget why you needed it.

If all you're doing is text processing that Perl can do out of the box, you probably only need the Python stdlib.

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