A waste of what, disk space? I'd much rather waste a few megabytes of disk space than hours or days of my time, which is much more precious. And what are you doing on those servers, anyway? Installing huge amounts of software, I bet. So install a little more!
For decades, on most Windows computers I run web browsers, there's always Internet Explorer. So do you still always use IE because installing Chrome is "wasteful"? It's a hell of a lot bigger and more wasteful than Python. As I already said, that is a weak and misleading and pernicious argument.
So what exactly is bash better than Python at, besides just starting up, which only matters if you write millions of little bash and awk and sed and find and tr and jq and curl scripts that all call each other, because none of them are powerful or integrated enough to solve the problem on their own.
Bash forces you to represent everything as strings, parsing and serializing and re-parsing them again and again. Even something as simple as manipulating json requires forking off a ridiculous number of processes, and parsing and serializing the JSON again and again, instead of simply keeping and manipulating it as efficient native data structures.
It makes absolutely no sense to choose a tool that you know is going to hit the wall soon, so you have to throw out everything you've done and rewrite it in another language. And you don't seem to realize that when you're duct-taping together all these other half-assed languages with their quirky non-standard incompatible byzantine flourishes of command line parameters and weak antique domain specific languages, like find, awk, sed, jq, curl, etc, you're ping-ponging between many different inadequate half-assed languages, and paying the price for starting up and shutting down each of their interpreters many times over, and serializing and deserializing and escaping and unescaping their command line parameters, stdin, and stdout, which totally blows away bash's quick start-up advantage.
You're arguing for learning and cobbling together a dozen or so different half-assed languages and flimsy tools, none of which you can also use to do general purpose programming, user interfaces, machine learning, web servers and clients, etc.
Why learn the quirks and limitations of all those shitty complex tools, and pay the cognitive price and resource overhead of stringing them all together, when you can simply learn one tool that can do all of that much more efficiently in one process, without any quirks and limitations and duct tape, and is much easier to debug and maintain?
> For decades, on most Windows computers I run web browsers, there's always Internet Explorer. As I already said, that is a weak and misleading and pernicious argument.
On its own, I agree. But you glossed over everything else I said, so I'm not going to entertain your weak argument.
You seem to ignore that different users, different use cases, different environments, etc. all need to be taken into account when choosing a tool.
Like I said, for most of my use cases where I use shell scripting, it's the best tool for the job. If you don't believe me, or think you know better about my circumstances than I do, all the power to you.
> You seem to ignore that different users, different use cases, different environments, etc. all need to be taken into account when choosing a tool.
I have worked on projects that are extremely sensitive to extra dependencies and projects that aren't.
Sometimes I am in an underground bunker and each dependency goes through an 18 month Department of Defense vetting process, and "Just install python" is equivalent to "just don't do the project". Other times I have worked on projects where tech debt was an afterthought because we didn't know if the code would still be around in a week and re-writing was a real option, so bringing in a dependency for a single command was worthwhile if we could solve the problem now.
There is appetite for risk, desire for control, need for flexibility, and many other factors just as you stated that DonHopkins is ignoring or unaware of.
I'm an avid jq user. There are certainly situations where it's better to use python because it's just more sane and easier to read/write, but jq does a few things extremely well, namely, compressing json, and converting json files consisting of big-ass arrays into line delimited json files.
For decades, on most Windows computers I run web browsers, there's always Internet Explorer. So do you still always use IE because installing Chrome is "wasteful"? It's a hell of a lot bigger and more wasteful than Python. As I already said, that is a weak and misleading and pernicious argument.
So what exactly is bash better than Python at, besides just starting up, which only matters if you write millions of little bash and awk and sed and find and tr and jq and curl scripts that all call each other, because none of them are powerful or integrated enough to solve the problem on their own.
Bash forces you to represent everything as strings, parsing and serializing and re-parsing them again and again. Even something as simple as manipulating json requires forking off a ridiculous number of processes, and parsing and serializing the JSON again and again, instead of simply keeping and manipulating it as efficient native data structures.
It makes absolutely no sense to choose a tool that you know is going to hit the wall soon, so you have to throw out everything you've done and rewrite it in another language. And you don't seem to realize that when you're duct-taping together all these other half-assed languages with their quirky non-standard incompatible byzantine flourishes of command line parameters and weak antique domain specific languages, like find, awk, sed, jq, curl, etc, you're ping-ponging between many different inadequate half-assed languages, and paying the price for starting up and shutting down each of their interpreters many times over, and serializing and deserializing and escaping and unescaping their command line parameters, stdin, and stdout, which totally blows away bash's quick start-up advantage.
You're arguing for learning and cobbling together a dozen or so different half-assed languages and flimsy tools, none of which you can also use to do general purpose programming, user interfaces, machine learning, web servers and clients, etc.
Why learn the quirks and limitations of all those shitty complex tools, and pay the cognitive price and resource overhead of stringing them all together, when you can simply learn one tool that can do all of that much more efficiently in one process, without any quirks and limitations and duct tape, and is much easier to debug and maintain?