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Discussion on: Looking for scripting language

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benbot profile image
Benjamin Botwin

Everything you listed (other than the need for a single binary) is pretty much why people use python.

Python is easy to write, easy to read, and runs the same on Windows, OSX, and Linux.

Ansible is a great python tool for provisioning servers.

For directory manipulation tasks and messing with excel sheets there's a ton of very mature, very well documented libraries in python-land.

There's even a cookbook for a lot of the work it sounds like you want to do!
Take a look at automatetheboringstuff.com/

But if you NEED a single binary, you should use go. It's not as simple as python, but it's not much harder. Though provisioning servers with go is, IMO, nowhere near as easy as it is with a tool like ansible

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

The single binary thing actually is covered for Python, it's just that almost nobody uses it because it's a huge amount of effort for what honestly is very little benefit (new enough Python can handle modules packed into ZIP files, which gets you the same 'copy this file and then run this command' functionality). Check out cx_freeze for the most used option.

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McSneaky

Yea, everyone seems to be using Python for all scripting. Need for single binary would just make it easier to send it to some non-it work mates over Slack / Discord etc so they can get some simple automation things done with it too. (Like converting Excel to PDF and hurling it to server over FTP automatically or something similar)

Definetly will look closer into Python