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"And guess what's the de facto programming language for AI? Yep, that sneaky one."

He's referring to Python in general

"Not only because the syntax is more human-friendly, but also because the Python interpreter is natively integrated in all Unix distros."

I think he means that its available or readily available in many major linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, NixOS, etc. I don't think native is the right word.

I use bash too but Python is amazing. You're right, there are problems related to packaging and speed, but it is still very often the right tool for the job. It's powerful, easy to use, and open source.

"I use bash too but Python is amazing."

I do not use bash. I use ash. Bash is too slow for me, like Python.

>I do not use Python for this; I use a 19-line shell script (ash not bash), its startup time is faster

Ash doesn't do web requests unless you've implemented HTTP in ash. You're back to using 3rd party dependencies that aren't installed on all systems

For this script I have "implemented HTTP" using printf, an ash builtin.

The TCP networking is done with orginal netcat reading the HTTP from a pipe.

The TLS is handled by a TLS forward proxy listening on the loopback.

The orginal netcat and other TCP clients I use, like tcpclient from djb's ucspi or tcploop from haproxy, are not part of the NetBSD base system but are easily added when I compile the OS. For Linux I use a custom distribution I make myself, without LFS. Busybox has ash and nc together in the same binary.

These TCP client programs are stationary targets, they will work reliably year after year, and small enough that I can store and compile them quickly even on computers with modest resources. Python is constantly evolving, a moving target, and much larger.

I wrote a utility in C89 that "implements HTTP" called yy025. This is produced using GCC, specifically flex, which is intsalled on all systems I use. flex is part of the NetBSD toolchain. It's a requirement for compiling the OS. It's a requirement for building many GNU userland utilities. It's even a listed requirement when building the Linux kernel.

yy025 is what I normally use in shell scripts when I need to generate HTTP. It reads URLs on stdin and outputs customised HTTP to stdout. There is no "third party dependency" for HTTP. This is a "first party" program. I wrote it.

But this script to fetch YouTube metadata doesn't use yy025. It's just some printf statements.

In more recent times, NetBSD has added OpenBSD's version of nc to the base system.

One could thus argue that there is a TCP client "installed on every system".

For me, what is more important is an installed copy of GCC. I have yet to use a UNIX-like system that did not have the needed networking functions to create a basic TCP client.

What is the reason you prefer not to simply let python lie around? Security?

Storage space usually. Even when I have surplus space I still like to have minimal userlands with only the utilities I am actually using.