[yeowMeng]

> The [python] scripts are much faster...

Pipelines are performant; many algorithms can be expressed as pipelines. Bash has many built-in string manipulation mechanisms which do not require a sub shell.

Why do people who subscribe to the “avoid shell scripts at all costs” ideology feel so passionately about prescribing to others?

I like python, but if I am in a rush it’s shell.

[kaliszad]

Actually, the one thing that I as a systems engineer really like about Clojure is the threading macro (-> some-data some-function-applied-on-some-data some-otherfunction) or (->> ...) for inserting not as a second, but last argument. That is like a pipeline but usually more readable to me even though I am proficient with the shell (and I must admit even PowerShell, which really is more comparable to Perl with a bit of SQL and other flavours here and there than bash).

Sysadmins/ system engineers might love Babashka: https://github.com/babashka/babashka which is a large subset of Clojure + some frequently used libraries as a native GraalVM image. It is portable, has very fast startup and if the script becomes a larger program, you can easily switch to ClojureScript + Node.js (e.g. for still very fast startup) or Clojure (on the normal JVM) or perhaps build your own GraalVM image. You might also just open a REPL and run it as a single session but that is rather unique in the sysadmin/ systems engineer space, where most things are launched on schedule e.g. each 5 minutes by a script and in case the startup time is somewhat long, it might dominate the execution time.

Btw. babashka seems to be about twice as fast to start on my Debian: time bb -e '(+ 1 1)' executes on average in about 11 ms vs time python3 -c 'print(1 + 1)' executes on average in about 23 ms

[neolog]

> Why do people who subscribe to the “avoid shell scripts at all costs” ideology feel so passionately about prescribing to others?

Are you asking why people make recommendations in general?

[marcosdumay]

Pipelines are a kernel feature that can be created on Python too. You'll just need to abstract it in a function.