Endgame Viable

I said before that The Pragmatic Programmer seems biased toward Unix environments and lacks much real-world experience with Microsoft environments. Here’s another example of that.

In the “Text Manipulation” section, we are advised to “Learn a Text Manipulation Language.” Which means, we are told, we should learn Python, Tcl, Ruby, or Perl. I’m not precisely sure — and the authors don’t tell us - what makes a language better suited for text manipulation than others. The authors do tell us that they “use text manipulation languages almost every day.”

I personally do not use text manipulation languages every day. I have been a working software developer for some 15+ years now and I can’t say I’ve ever felt the need to learn an entirely new language exclusively for the purpose of manipulating text files. On those occasions when I do need to manipulate text files, I find that regular old mainstream languages work just fine. I hate to sound like an old fuddy duddy, but it’s really not that hard to read lines from a text file and parse them, ya know? Even in archaic C, it’s just “while (fgets(buffer, len, fh) != NULL) { }”

Was it really necessary to invent new languages to make that easier?