perl -lne 'print if s/(a )?[Nn]ewspaper[s]?/the Internet/g and s/(reads|from) them/$1 the Internet/g'
```
produces a better result:
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in the Internet. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading the Internet, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in the Internet are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from the Internet, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into the Internet is better informed than he who reads the Internet; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
@thatguyoverthere
> perl
I will court-martial you!
@thatguyoverthere
Ha-ha-ha! No, for one-liners it's actually a perfect tool!
Still have PTSD from using it — every function being a collection of =~ s/…/…/ 😄
Probably why we don't have inline regular expressions in Python and have this re.compile() thing — a hint that coders should at least name them.
@thatguyoverthere@shitposter.world
@thatguyoverthere Not as good as Perl is for manipulating text, but Python is a decent scripting language. I wish I would use it more where I use shell scripts. It has some amazing third-party modules too, such as requests. If they weren't attempting to use it for everything and the kitchen sink and weren't introducing breaking changes that often, it would be a great tool!
It actually frustrates me that pytorch has become the defacto standard for working with neural networks because I'm pretty sure you could achieve the same functionality in literally any other langage with less overhead.
@thatguyoverthere
My experiences are the opposite of yours: I've seen originally neat code base in Perl turn into a disgusting mess over mere weeks when being worked on by a medium-sized team under a time constraint. At the same time a smaller team have expanded s much less capable framework that was originally in Python, so that it almost reached function parity. And their code did NOT turn into abominable shite. This was partly thanks to the enforced use of whitespace.
@thatguyoverthere
Needless to say, we all switched to the Python implementation eventually 😅
Yes, there are other ways to fix it, enforced Code-discipline, code reviews… But I've seen it with my own eyes: when time presses, commits get pushed no matter what, just because right now the code does what it has to do. So for me it's Python since then.
@thatguyoverthere
Just like you, I respect other opinions, using Perl for one-off thingies — that is perfectly fine, but I will never approve of using it for anything bigger — never again! 😂
And I agree, Python gets overused a lot, it gets used where it's not appropriate, its performance is inadequate in some of these use cases, but as a scripting language? It's a good one — better than most alternatives.
@thatguyoverthere
> I think relying on external modules too much can lead to sloppy code that is difficult to maintain
True, but there are really good ones — the ones that do not what you could do with a one-liner, but provide adequate level of abstraction over complex things, like above-mentioned requests…
@thatguyoverthere
Or bottle.py — the single file web framework I use for my cmus web remote control — it made switching to Python 3.13 in which they have deprecated the cgi module, which was in the standard library since the early days, less painful.
