> Lisp and Python: Which one you prefer to use to write quick and dirty hacks?
There is a Lisp dialect for the "C-and-Unix crowd": TXR Lisp.
Similarly to traditional tools like Awk, TXR Lisp has no external dependencies and builds into a single native executable (plus a collection of satellite files that go into /usr/share). It is documented by a single giant man page ("man txr"), which also exists in the form of a hyper-linked HTML document with a collapsible, two-way navigable table of contents.
Though fine for larger applications, it scales down to throwaway scripting, including one-liners on the command line.
It includes a whole-document scraping language called the TXR Pattern Language that is good for extraction tasks. Especially for "messy" text that consists of multiple ad hoc structures slapped together.
> Lisp and Python: Which one you prefer to use to write quick and dirty hacks?
There is a Lisp dialect for the "C-and-Unix crowd": TXR Lisp.
Similarly to traditional tools like Awk, TXR Lisp has no external dependencies and builds into a single native executable (plus a collection of satellite files that go into /usr/share). It is documented by a single giant man page ("man txr"), which also exists in the form of a hyper-linked HTML document with a collapsible, two-way navigable table of contents.
Though fine for larger applications, it scales down to throwaway scripting, including one-liners on the command line.
It includes a whole-document scraping language called the TXR Pattern Language that is good for extraction tasks. Especially for "messy" text that consists of multiple ad hoc structures slapped together.