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Ask HN: Should I learn Awk or Perl? Or is that a bad question?

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Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Awk or Perl? Or is that a bad question?

#21

Post by _xk9i »

muzani wrote: post #14
_xk9i wrote: post #13

The case for Perl is just that it has no limits. You will never run out of tool if you go with Perl. That is what, I believe, makes the investment worthwhile. Why Perl gets such a bad rap, then? I'll tell you. I've used Perl for almost 30 years now, and I've never found any limits in the tool. This means every limit I found was _mine_. Many programmers feel bad when they find their own limits, but it doesn't have to…

This is good insight. Limits are often built into programming languages. Java is all about the limits. TS's selling point is literally the limits. As well as every opinionated language. I wonder if AI will make limitless languages easier to work with and maintain.

I'm not against limits in programming languages. They help to reduce the complexity that have to be managed.

Limited languages are suitable for those that are willing to manage only so much. That's why Java has no "goto".

But Perl does offer "goto". Why? Because Larry Wall built Perl for himself, and he wanted the most powerful tool that he could conceive. That's exactly what Perl is.

And I accept that, and I really want that. Every time I mess up with Perl, I don't blame my tool. I just laugh out loud and exclaim: "Thanks, Larry, for letting me know another way to not be up to my job".

Perl is the magic wand. If you don't want to be a magician, you don't need it.

But if you want to be a magician, you'll be thrilled to know Perl has three forms of "goto", not just one. This is what the textbook says about the third one: "The goto &NAME form is highly magical and sufficiently removed from the ordinary goto to exempt its users from the opprobium to which goto users are customarily subjected".

Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Awk or Perl? Or is that a bad question?

#22

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #20
gregw2 wrote: post #16

Having learned both at an intermediate level, I use awk for structured data handling, Perl for textual pattern matching. Perl was inspired by awk, not the other way around. Perl is more general purpose.

this was my understanding as well. perl grew out of sed/awk/bash, so might as well learn perl. that said, i found it gives a lot of 'foot-guns'.

>> i found it gives a lot of 'foot-guns'.

Most of those are for backward compatilibity with earlier versions.

Recommend you place the following at the top of your Perl scripts:

    use strict;
    use warnings;
These are recommended for all scripts: https://learn.perl.org/first_steps/

Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Awk or Perl? Or is that a bad question?

#23

Post by AnthOlei »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #10

>> I’m also noticing a lack of literature on Perl on the command line, I.e “perl -nae ”. Searching for 'perl one liners' and the related term 'perl golf' gives many articles and books: https://www.perl.com/article/perl-one-liners-part-1/ https://www.perl.com/article/perl-one-liners-part-2/ https://catonmat.net/perl-one-liners-explained-part-one https://catonmat.net/perl-one-liners-explained-part-two https://catonmat.…

this is amazing! I guess I was searing the wrong keywords. Thanks, I’ll evaluate these.

Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Awk or Perl? Or is that a bad question?

#24

Post by AnthOlei »

asicsp wrote: post #17

> noticing a lack of literature on Perl on the command line I have written a book on Perl one-liners with plenty of examples and exercises [0]. I've also written books on CLI text processing tools like grep, sed, awk and coreutils [1]. If you prefer just solving exercises, check out my interactive TUI apps [2]. > Is awk just better for this use case? It depends on the kind of tasks you'd need to solve. I generally pr…

Oh wow. I went though some of the perl book you linked and I was noticing the examples were really familiar; I then realized you were the same guy who wrote the awk book I have been going though.

Your work is excellent! Thank you, I’ll buy a copy soon.

Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Awk or Perl? Or is that a bad question?

#25

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

Perl is far more capable than awk and more portable.

The issue with awk is that there are multiple non-interoperable implementations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK#Versions_and_implementatio...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40409632/what-is-the-dif...

This makes awk scripts less portable than other text processing tools.

awk is also not extensible--it can be awkward (heh) to adapt it to some problems and big scripts get difficult to wrangle.

awk is great if your text processing problem is small.

Sometimes small problems grow in which case Perl tends to be a better choice:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/366980/what-are-the-diff...

People love to hate perl, but there is a reason why it was installed on all Unix and Linux systems by default and was so popular for web servers on the early Internet (e.g. Apache mod_perl https://perl.apache.org/ and perl mason https://www.perl.com/pub/2002/12/11/mason.html/ ).

Perl also popularized regular expressions as a standard component of programming languages so much that "Perl-compatible regular expressions" are probably the most widely-used regex flavor versus POSIX or other regex variants:

http://www.pcre.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Awk or Perl? Or is that a bad question?

#26

Post by fargle »

AWK is better suited to command line ad-hoc and shell script use. it is simple, straight-forward, and surprisingly powerful. most of the time sh+awk can replace sh+sed+cut+grep constructs. GNU awk (gawk) flavor is ubiquitous and it has a great manual [1]. and you have the AWK book [2] (not "free", but easily found).

perl is more of a completely replacement for sh+awk for a standalone script/program. it was the first scripting language i know of that could do sockets networking and other complex things you'd previously need to write in c. it has extremely powerful text processing capabilities, like awk. but it's a big complicated, unusual scripting language. if you want a big complex full-featured scripting language to make a complete tool these days, why not use Python? if you only need really fancy text manipulation, maybe Perl, but i don't see that use a lot.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/index.htm... [2] https://awk.dev/

Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Awk or Perl? Or is that a bad question?

#27

Post by Kim_Bruning »

pestatije wrote: post #8

i wouldnt go for perl...id suggest the better question to be awk vs python, in which case id go for python

This is a saner answer than you might think.

In theory Python is the more verbose of these languages. But when I switched from Perl to Python way back when, my short scripts actually got shorter, were quicker and easier to write, and you could actually read them back and understand what they said!

Of course both Perl and Python have changed a lot since I last compared them, so YMMV these days somewhat. I'd be interested to hear from a modern perl-er!

(And: I do still use PCRE libraries sometimes :-P )

Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Awk or Perl? Or is that a bad question?

#28

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

srean wrote: post #9

How much time do you want to invest ? Perl is more powerful but learning and remembering all (or a sufficiently more powerful superset of awk's capabilities) of it is going to take time. The peculiarities of its syntax is certainly not a small set. All of awk on the other hand needs about 2 hours, if you have done some programming before.

>> Perl is more powerful but learning and remembering all (or a sufficiently more powerful superset of awk's capabilities) of it is going to take time. The peculiarities of its syntax is certainly not a small set.

I disagree.

Perl's syntax is easy to learn for anyone who has used C-style syntax as found in C, C++, Java, Javascript, or C#:

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlintro

Perl's syntax is more similar to AWK and C-style languages than Python is.

That said, there is nothing wrong with Python or AWK. They work great and have their places. But it is silly how many people treat Perl like it is impossible to learn or read without ever having used it or seeing where it is used.

Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Awk or Perl? Or is that a bad question?

#29

Post by nextos »

fargle wrote: post #26

AWK is better suited to command line ad-hoc and shell script use. it is simple , straight-forward, and surprisingly powerful. most of the time sh+awk can replace sh+sed+cut+grep constructs. GNU awk (gawk) flavor is ubiquitous and it has a great manual [1]. and you have the AWK book [2] (not "free", but easily found). perl is more of a completely replacement for sh+awk for a standalone script/program. it was the first…

IMHO, Ruby is a much better Perl replacement than Python.

Ruby is heavily inspired by Perl and lets you do a lot of work with simple one liners embedded in Bash scripts.

It's also great for longer standalone programs and there is a larger community.

Lots of interesting Perl-isms are also doable in Ruby.

Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Awk or Perl? Or is that a bad question?

#30

Post by wruza »

_xk9i wrote: post #13

The case for Perl is just that it has no limits. You will never run out of tool if you go with Perl. That is what, I believe, makes the investment worthwhile. Why Perl gets such a bad rap, then? I'll tell you. I've used Perl for almost 30 years now, and I've never found any limits in the tool. This means every limit I found was _mine_. Many programmers feel bad when they find their own limits, but it doesn't have to…

My reason to break up with Perl was the lack of garbage collection and then later the lack of types and then later 6.

I don’t think investing in it is wise when you can invest in something more relevant. Although there’s barely anything that covers the subj as much as Perl, which is a shame on us all. A programming language that requires an import or two to dig through a file is degenerate. Old languages understood well what a programmer needs.

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