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Right. It kinda sucks for that purpose too, which gives Make a bad name.

What gives make a bad name is the same thing that gave javascript or m4 a bad name - these things are their own exotic birds - doing them well require new concepts and new behaviors.

You can indeed shoehorn them into what you know but really you need to fully embrace their weird world.

See also forth, dc, awk, jq ...

It'd be nice to have a dedicated crash course on these things for people who understand conventional programming and have been doing the normal stuff for a number of years.

Also see supercollider, prolog, haskell, apl...

I think the most mainstream exotic bird people learn is Lisp. Doing all these things well is as different as Lisp is from say conventional python.

Forth it's far easier than dc.

On Lisp, exotic? it's damn easy. Haskell it's far worse.

I’m confused. Are you saying that python is less exotic than javascript, jq, awk, m4, haskell, lisp, dc, prolog, apl, and supercollider therefore it’s bad, but the least bad out of these?

It may suck for it, but it’s better than a collection of random scripts and commands baked into CI configuration that evolve to become unrunnable in normal dev environments.

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