The languages I code in

While writing my last post about growing my own software, I also started thinking about which languages I use for my projects.1 Bash I live on Linux now, so Bash seems like the obvious choice for smaller scripts. You can do a lot with Bash glueing your terminal tools together, but there’s a hard to anticipate maximum point of complexity where things start to get uncomfortable. I say hard to anticipate, because I regularly find myself with a huge complicated Bash script and wish that I’d have written it in Python from the start. I’ve gotten better, in that I ask myself if whatever I’m building will be doing web requests (I love curl, but doing XML or JSON transformation in Bash is terrible2) or if I’ll have to store and modify multi-line strings (kinda related to my previous point about web responses). I think Bash is best used as minimalistic glue code to run through a list of terminal operations. Python Python’s biggest benefit is that it runs everywhere and is installed pretty much…