New post

content/blog/writing-simple-scripts.md

@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
+---
+title: "On Writing Simple Scripts"
+date: 2022-05-19T20:40:19-04:00
+draft: false
+tags: []
+math: false
+---
+
+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:
+
+- No dependencies outside the language
+- Language is interpreted (I don't want to worry about build dependencies)
+- Comes preinstalled on systems I care about
+
+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.
+
+Though that begs the question, what is sufficiently complicated? Here are some tasks that I don't think Bash is suited for:
+
+- Data Parsing
+  - I know `ack`, `sed`, and `grep` exist, but they're complicated and unintuitive to use. We write programs for *people first*, computers second.
+  - Harder to parse JSON. The program `jq` exists but that's not part of the GNU coreutils.
+- Math
+  - 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)`
+- Anything requiring abstract data types
+  - (Associative) arrays in bash are scary to me
+  - 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))
+- Argument Parsing
+  - Attempted to [parse arguments in bash](/blog/bashpartialargparse/), but [parsing arguments in Python](/blog/python-argpase/) is much cleaner to me.
+
+So why Python? 
+
+- Comes preinstalled on most Linux systems as they're often used in desktop environments
+- Currently has developer mindshare so others are apt to understand the scripts
+
+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...
+