scripting languages

[Levi Pearson]

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 12:19 PM, Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/08/2010 10:21 AM, Kenneth Burgener wrote:
>> stringing several external commands is more
>> complicated (very simple in bash an Perl), but Python does have good
>> readability and vast libraries, and is becoming the popular choice.
>
> I used to think this as well.  Then I realized I was using Python wrong.
>  The only reason you string things together in Bash is usually because
> Bash really doesn't do much on its own.  So you'd do something like:
>
> ps ax | grep blah | grep -v grep | awk ' { print $1; }'

This reminds me of a clever scripting language I ran across a while
ago.  It's scsh, the Scheme Shell.  It's a variant of Scheme that is
modified to make it very simple to execute processes and plug their
input/ouput into other processes.  Of course, the parenthesized prefix
syntax make it a non-starter for a lot of people these days, but I
think the core ideas could be ported to something like Ruby and make a
scripting language that would be awesome for unix system automation.
Here's the manual, for anyone interested:
http://www.scsh.net/docu/html/man.html

The Acknowledgements section on the linked page is worth reading even
if you're not interested in the program itself, by the way.

        --Levi