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Comment by dsturnbull2049 | Hacker News Reader

dsturnbull2049·

Python and Ruby are just as bad as Perl for this. Python being the least fluent of the three for scripting.

If you want a proper language to support your scripting goals, then if you go right up to something like Ocaml or Haskell you'll skip all the pointless stringly-typed problems of perl/ruby/python.

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TCL, REBOL or Red - or maybe some kind of Lisp even - could be better than Python for scripting. There are probably other good languages for this, like maybe Io.

Haskell and OCaml and Java and C++ are about equally badly suited for the job. No, they don't make a good scripting languages. And they don't even want to. Why would anyone try to write shell scripts with them is really beyond me.

It's hard to take people seriously who suggest Haskell as a good language for general scripting. That's some powerful religion.

Yeah, "stringly-typed" isn't really a problem when you're mostly dealing with files made up of strings/lines. Interfacing between programs and files which output mostly idiosyncratic output over an interface of files and strings isn't really made any easier or more robust by using a heavy type system and functional purity...

Can you give an example where Haskell or Ocaml would be more appropriate than the scripting languages you mention?

You're in for a fun surprise if you ever do embedded linux software where a full python or ruby interpreter will either blow your flash space requirements, be too slow or simply unavailable. Perl is a way better option but even then might be too heavy. Busybox however will have a sed or awk.

These are tools that are not going away tomorrow just because something better exists.

awk+sed, perl, and python are at least somewhat universal - ocaml and haskell are not. Heck, awk+sed even more so, any unix system almost no matter how old, or odd has some version of those two tools on them.

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