Text Manipulation

As plain text is our most common means of building stuff it is really important to know how to manipulate it properly. Luckily there are languages that are really good at manipulating text like python, ruby or perl. David and Thomas mention that these languages are really great for quickly writing a little script to manipulate some text. Need to convert some csv to json or vice versa? Hack some python script together to do it for you. You will only have o write it once, and then you can reuse that for as long as you want. This is really useful stuff! These scripting languages are also very good for experimenting little programs for automating other kinds of processes since they are often on a higher level. I guess when you compare python code to c# code, the python code will most likely look simpler and require less setup and infrastructure. I mean with C# you will need a solution file and all that other crap. With python you just run the .py file through the interpreter and voila.

So learn some text manipulation language! It will really help you out at some point! My bet will be on python since it’s really accessible and pretty much standardized in the software community. Everyone born after the turn of the millennium, who has ever touched a computer nowadays seems to know some basic python. On the other hand, Lua might be nice as well since it has a foothold in the gaming industry. I didn’t think about that before. But I guess, the ecosystem of tooling will be far greater in python.

In the book they give a couple of examples of how text manipulation comes in handy. I wont go into them, if you want to know them. Maybe parse the full text of the book and extract them! It’s on page 100 and 101.

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