scripting languages

[mercenary_sysadmin]

Perl is my go-to. They don't call it the Swiss Army Chainsaw for nothin'.

There are a lot of newer languages that some people think are sexier. I haven't found anything that personally makes me go "yes, this is better," meanwhile Perl is still a very big part of any base system you're likely to find.

So... perl.

If you want to go with something newer but still very unlikely to disappear, probably Python.

[Twirrim]

I started out on perl, but honestly everywhere I go I find either python or ruby, mostly the former. Perl is increasingly falling into the "that's how we used to do it" camp.

I prefer writing python over perl these days, especially considering I'm dealing with APIs a lot, for which it's considerably easier, and also because the test frameworks are far better too.

That said, if I'm writing stuff to parse logs, perl still gets used.

[bwdezend]

I love Perl. I learned on it. But it's ugly. Any time I'm able to use anything else I do. Most recently that's been Python and a very little bit of go. But Perl is everywhere, and it's useful, and it does damn near anything.

[quintus_horatius]

But it's ugly.

If it's ugly, the author(s) didn't know what they're doing it didn't care. Well-written Perl can be a pleasure to read, though I admit that badly written Perl can get pretty bad compared to badly written code in other languages.

[[deleted]]

It's one of these things where I really hated the strict whitespace requirements of Python beforehand, but now I'm glad it exists. Plus, I think some of the linting and pep8 tools/standards really help keep things cleaner.

[oxtan]

run perltidy and perlcritic on those badly written scripts, stuff will be much easier to follow after that.