Python is never the right answer!
I know there’s a lot of downvotes because there are people reading this as hate toward Python. On one hand, one can make the case that it is overused and this doesn’t bold well for those that simply can never like it’s syntax. On the other hand, Python is perfect for small scripts that isn’t tailored for a Domain or just quick codes.
thoughts on lua ?
If I have to install it myself instead of being able to assume it’s on the system by default, that’s a Problem.
… minimastic iso users: 😐
also i think it comes with neovim
Python is the second best language for everything. Having one language that does it all is better than learning several that might do it a little bit better.
Careful, that attitude is how we ended up with this infestation of JavaScript!
Speed is a serious problem in Python though. Python has its use cases, and so do other languages. Things would not end well if we started using Python for everything.
If I wanted to write a 3D game engine, I wouldn’t use Python either. But there’s zero chance of me ever doing that. For 90% of things 90% of people do, Python works just fine. And the performance thing is actively being worked on and getting better all the time.
This might be an unpopular opinion but python’s speed wouldn’t even be an issue if it was 5x slower than it is now.
Python is a language designed for write-time performance, not runtime performance.
Python is the best “glue” language I’ve ever used. When you want to chain together your program’s high-level logic and all of the loops happen inside lower-level languages like Rust, Go, Zig, D or C, Python’s performance is perfectly adequate and it’s so clear and concise it reads like pseudocode.
Things that could have been done in bash is python’s best usecase. And bash sucks for scripting. Why not python?
There are many cases where bash/shell is better than Python. For one, any time you’re just stringing together 2-4 existing shell tools, bash has unbeatable speed since it’s all running in C. Plus, you should probably learn the tools anyways to handle CLI stuff on a day-to-day level, so the knowledge is reusable and becomes very intuitive to compose into some crazy one-liner piped chains of commands. If I just want to loop over a set of directories and do a couple chained CLI commands on each directory, this is the way I go.
That said, in cases where you’re doing something very custom, any time you’re doing something that can’t be simply described as a chain of CLI tool transformations, and any time you want to maintain a global state across a complex set of operations outside of a pipeline, I agree that Python is generally a more robust solution with much easier maintainability.
compose into some crazy one-liner piped chains of commands
Why not something that is completely redesigned from the ground up:
That looks really elegant. I think I’m gonna give it a try. Thanks a lot for the recommendation!
I can’t think of a single reason to use bash over Python. Anything you can do in bash can be done in pure Python. Unless you’re working in some embedded environment it’s a non-issue to install a Python interpreter (you certainly already have one). I would only use sh/bash for packages I’m distributing to avoid the external dependency, and then only if it’s a relatively simple script.
Bash is much better for doing file operations and piping the output across multiple commands
Better than subprocess.getoutput?
I know whatever environment I run my shell script in has
sh, I can’t rely on (the right version of) python being there.Why not?
i would not run a python script with root.
i run my daily NAS backup python script with root.
Python is superior for string anything (parsing, searching, manipulating). But Bash is much simpler for running existing CLI tools. Plus you should already be using Bash as a simple terminal language already, so wrapping what you’re used to into a simple script flows naturally.
Eg, if I have some admin tool for updating a user thingamajig, a common scripting need is just running that tool for every user in a file (or the output of another command). The string manipulation that often requires is annoying in bash, but running the commands is easier than Python.
If what you’re doing is essentially a few shell commands, then you may as well put it into a script. If you’re talking about how “elegant” your shell scripts are and comparing them to Python, you’re probably wrong and should be using Python.
