> the best tools. If you know shell, egrep and awk, they are probably better > than Python at doing the things they do. > > For me, I don't know those specialized tools and I have chosen not to > learn them because I don't often need their capabilities and Python can do > what they do.
I must admit I use a myriad of tools, including several text editors. Its one of the few areas where I disagree with Hunt & Thomas in "the Pragmatic Programmer", they advocate choosing one editor and using it exclusively, I use emacs, vim, xedit and even ed on a daily basis (OK ed only once a month or so!) But I also use awk and sed weekly. I've also don't think I've ever worked on a production project that used less than 5 languages and some have used 12 or more. Awk in particular is one that I think every programmer should know, at least at a basic level, in the same way as everyone should learn a little Tcl and a little Lisp(*). These languages are sufficiently different to mainstream in structure that we can learn a lot about how to create programs by looking at their approach. It's fair to say that we probably wouldn't have ElementTree, BeautifulSoup, SAX or any other event driven parsers today if it weren't for awk and its elegant approach to working with text files. (*)For those building business apps I'd add COBOL to the list. It's not just history that makes it still the most widely used language on the planet according to Infoweek. Alan G Author of the learn to program web tutor http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
