why Unix?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:35:04 -0400, grauzone <none at example.net> wrote:

>> But shell scripting in itself is so powerful for this kind of stuff.   
>> I've written lots of little scripts to do fantastic things that on  
>> Windows would be so painful (without cygwin of course).  Like renaming  
>> all files of a certain type to something else, or copying select files  
>> to another directory.
>
> Now wouldn't that be much more powerful to use an actual programming  
> language for this, instead of bash? I claim with something like python,  
> bash doesn't really have any right to exist anymore.

I can log into ANY Linux, Solaris, BSD, OSX, etc system and have a  
reasonable /bin/sh that allows at least bourne shell functionality.  The  
same can't be said for almost any other scripting language you can throw  
at me.

Of course, aside from that, I hate python syntax...  And can python be  
used as a user shell?

How would you do the same thing in python?  Would it be any clearer or  
shorter?  Probably not.

I'm sure some would argue that there is no point for python if you can run  
perl...

-Steve