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37 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
37 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: "On Writing Simple Scripts"
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date: 2022-05-19T20:40:19-04:00
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draft: false
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tags: []
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math: false
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---
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I generally prefer a simpler solution to a problem if possible. This comes especially true with scripting. If I write a small script for something like say my website I generally have three requirements of the system:
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- No dependencies outside the language
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- Language is interpreted (I don't want to worry about build dependencies)
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- Comes preinstalled on systems I care about
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I primarily work on Linux systems and very rarely don't. Therefore, the simplest scripting language for me to write in is Bash. In fact, I generally reach for that first. If what I need to do is sufficiently complicated, then the next language I'll reach for is Python.
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Though that begs the question, what is sufficiently complicated? Here are some tasks that I don't think Bash is suited for:
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- Data Parsing
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- I know `ack`, `sed`, and `grep` exist, but they're complicated and unintuitive to use. We write programs for *people first*, computers second.
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- Harder to parse JSON. The program `jq` exists but that's not part of the GNU coreutils.
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- Math
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- I believe `bc` is the easiest command to use to process arithmetical expressions. Though this also then involves constructing strings to pass into bc. For example: `result=$(echo "1 + 5" | bc)`
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- Anything requiring abstract data types
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- (Associative) arrays in bash are scary to me
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- Slawomir's functional programming in [bash library](https://github.com/ssledz/bash-fun) makes it more bearable. ([My fork](https://github.com/Brandon-Rozek/bashfun))
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- Argument Parsing
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- Attempted to [parse arguments in bash](/blog/bashpartialargparse/), but [parsing arguments in Python](/blog/python-argpase/) is much cleaner to me.
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So why Python?
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- Comes preinstalled on most Linux systems as they're often used in desktop environments
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- Currently has developer mindshare so others are apt to understand the scripts
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Both those reasons are likely to make it so that my choice will change over time. Perl used to be the very popular choice for scripting...
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