I carry a Leatherman on my belt every day wherever I go. It has become a bit of an extension of my body, which I only really notice when I have to fly somewhere and I’m forced to take it off for the flight. Then I get to my destination and I can’t open the cable ties on my luggage. At the same time, I have a whole pinboard of tools up in my garage, which overlap somewhat with my Leatherman: a dedicated set of pliers, some dedicated screwdrivers and scissors and so on. This is because the Leatherman is not as good as any of these dedicated tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think the same goes for programming languages, and therefore I have learned quite a few, just like I have stocked my pinboard with tools that do one thing very well. Many people find learning new languages onerous and will try to find the one language that does everything they want to do well. Their arguments against learning a new language often involves something like “but I can do that just fine in my language, and then I don’t have to learn a new language”. Here’s an example from real life that illustrates the advantages of special purpose languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My father approaches me with this problem. He uses an accounting package which can import OFX files<\/a> (they’re an SGML\/XML format for financial records), but there is a slight problem. The ZAR needs to be changed to USD and the dates (which are tags of the form <DT20111201><\/code> – yes, no closing tag as it’s SGML) have to be changed from YYYYMMDD to YYYYDDMM. Now, turns out that Python has a nice OFX module. So does Java<\/a>. But the fastest way to make the changes to his files is probably sed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n