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Comment by vidarh

3 hours ago

It's a fun post, and I love language experiments with LLMs (I'm close to hitting the weekly limit of my Claude Max subscription because I have a near-constantly running session working on my Ruby compiler; Claude can fix -- albeit with messy code sometimes -- issues that requires complex tracing of backtraces with gdb, and fix complex parser interactions almost entirely unaided as long as it has a test suite to run).

But here's the Ruby version of one of the scripts:

    BEGIN {
      result = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
        .filter {|x| x % 2 == 0 }
        .map {|x| x * x}
        .reduce {|acc,x| acc + x }
     puts "Result: #{result}"
    }

The point being that running a script with the "-n" switch un runs BEGIN/END blocks and puts an implicit "while gets ... end" around the rest. Adding "-a" auto-splits the line like awk. Adding "-p" also prints $_ at the end of each iteration.

So here's a more typical Awk-like experience:

    ruby -pe '$_.upcase!' somefile.txt ($_ has the whole line)

Or:

    ruby -F, -ane '$F[1]' # Extracts the second field field -F sets the default character to split on, and -a adds an implicit $F = $_.split.

That is not to detract from what he's doing because it's fun. But if your goal is just to use a better Awk, then Ruby is usually better Awk, and so, for that matter, is Perl, and for most things where an Awk script doesn't fit on the command line the only reason to really use Awk is that it is more likely to be available.

3 comments

vidarh

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shevy-java  25 minutes ago

> That is not to detract from what he's doing because it's fun. But if your goal is just to use a better Awk, then Ruby is usually better Awk

I agree, but I also would not use such one liners in ruby. I tend to write more elaborate scripts that do the filtering. It is more work, but I hate to burden my brain with hard to remember sigils. That's why I don't really use sed or awk myself, though I do use it when other people write it. I find it much simpler to just write the equivalent ruby code and use e. g. .filter or .select instead. So something like:

   ruby -F, -ane '$F[1]'

I'd never use because I wouldn't have the faintest idea what $F[1] would do. I assume it is a global variable and we access the second element of whatever is stored in F? But either way, I try to not have to think when using ruby, so my code ends up being really dumb and simple at all times.

> for that matter, is Perl

I'd agree but perl itself is a truly ugly language. The advantages over awk/sed are fairly small here.

> the only reason to really use Awk is that it is more likely to be available.

People used the same explanation with regard to bash shell scripts or perl (typically more often available on a cluster than python or ruby). I understand this but still reject it; I try to use the tool that is best. So, for me, python and ruby are better than perl; and all are better than awk/sed/shell scripts. I am not in the camp of users who want to use shell scripts + awk + sed for everything. I understand that it can be useful, but I much prefer just writing the solution in a ruby script and then use that. I actually wrote numerous ruby scripts and aliases, so I kind of use these in pipes too, e. g. "delem" is just my alias for delete_empty_files (defaults to the current working directory), so if I use a pipe in bash, with delem between two | |, then it just does this specific action. The same is true for numerous other actions, so ruby kind of "powers" my system. Of course people can use awk or sed or rm and so forth and pipe the correct stuff in there, which also works, but I found that my brain just can not want to be bothered to remember all flags. I just want to think in terms of super-simple instructions at all times and keep on re-using them; and extending them if I need to. So ruby kind of functions as a replacement for me for all computer-related actions in general. It is the ultimate glue for me to efficiently work with a computer system. Anything that can be scripted and automated and I may do more than once, I end up writing into ruby and then just tapping into that functionality. I could do the same in python too for the most part, so this is a very comparable use case. I did not do it in perl, largely because I find perl just to be too ugly to use efficiently.