alt Hacker News> And what would you recommend for a system automation script 20 years ago, when I was 13 and discovered Linux for the first time?
Like I said:
> Maybe it had to be that way because we didn’t know any better … But that doesn’t make it good.
I’ve gotten kind of pointlessly good at bash tricks—the weird advanced shit that Wooledge warns about. Same for Perl5: 6 years on a multimillion line healthcare monolith wishing for a real object system, a single scoping model instead of three, and people to stop implementing rickety DSLs because the language was just flexible enough to let them but not flexible enough to make the tooling or DX any good.
All of which is to say: I get it. Those languages were some of the first I learned, and hold a charming sort of nostalgia for me as well. They are still objectively bad. We have vastly better tools now in those niches.
> We have vastly better tools now in those niches.
But do we? I'll beg to differ.
Python explodes in to LoC when you try to attempt to work with the OS. You need to source modules that turn the application in to bloat. 98% of def's you don't require.
If you need a multi-purpose tool, or a model than sure. For the simple automation of running a rsync or ZFS snapshot schedule to copy to & from a NAS in a guaranteed timely manner in cron, it works just fine. The overhead of using languages compared to the previous is partly why I keep using bash or Tcl.