Which programming languages are appropriate here?

Question

This isn't a site for asking programming questions. It's well understood that pure programming questions should be moved to stackoverflow.com.

There does seem to be an exception for bash, even where those questions are purely about bash (eg: bash syntax) and not the *nix shell at large (eg: interaction between other commands).

When asking questions, it's clear enough that questions about grep, awk, sed are accepted as appropriate on unix.stackexchange.com. I'd personally vote-off-topic any pure python or C question if they weren't about interaction with the wider OS. But I wouldn't be so sure about perl or expect.

Then when giving answers I'm even less certain. For example I see occasional how-to questions which (IMO) are ridiculously complex in bash, awk, sed, etc. but trivial in python, (<10 lines, no non-standard libraries). On such questions I wait and see if other answers are forthcoming. But if they get no answers, I'm not sure if I should give my 10 lines of python or not.

Is there any list of which languages / tools we should stick to when offering answers. And, if bash questions are on topic, which other languages should we regard as on-topic?

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This isn't a site for asking programming questions. Yet we have made exceptions for a (fuzzy?) set of programming languages. See scope page:

If your question is a programming question, requiring knowledge of programming languages other than Unix shell scripting languages, ask on Stack Overflow.

Even our scope page implies these are programming questions (which they are). In practice I don't know a competent Linux user who doesn't know a little programming. And specifically shell scripting is largely mandatory for all but the casual user.

Where this starts to come unstuck is with tags like text-processing, where there are many questions asking how to perform some programming task "in a shell script". I don't think this was the intended purpose of including shell-script-programming questions in our scope. This doesn't feel in keeping with the purpose of the site. It seems to have wedged open our scope further. Yet I see no easy fix.

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My purpose for asking the question was to flag that (I feel) stuck between three options:

1. Acknowledge programmer questions for what they are and vote to close / migrate them even if they were about shell scripting.
2. Acknowledge programmer questions for what they are and wede the scope further by offering a programmer's answer. One written in a proper programming language. Trollish tone NOT intended.
3. Write an answer that's not as good as I'd give a colleague, but is written in bash, awk, sed...

Answer 1

Addressing specifically the scope of answers, I note that the scope of the site is defined in terms of questions, it doesn’t limit answers.

So when answering, I would say that anything that’s helpful to answer the question is fine. I’ve written quite a few C programs to answer questions here, and in some cases I’ve even explained the process. If you have a better solution to a text-processing problem (or any other question) in Python, R, etc. than existing answers using shell or AWK, that solution certainly has its place here in my opinion.

If you want to phrase this in terms of scope compared to Stack Overflow, I’d consider things as follows:

• questions about how to write a program to do something are a better fit Stack Overflow (except when the question author specifically asks about a language which is accepted here);
• questions about how to do something on a Unix-like system are fine here.

Questions about the system’s behaviour are also fine here, and they can often involve digging into source code, often in C.

Remember that Unix’s forte (or not, depending on your point of view) has always been that it’s a self-hosted operating system designed to make it easy to develop itself, and the result is (still) that advanced system administration often ends up being programming in one way or another. In such a context, exposure to better tools and techniques is good for everyone.

(Looking at it from another angle, I often think it would be helpful to write more GUI-based answers, but it’s a lot more effort than copy-pasting commands...)

Answer 2

Stack Exchange does not divide up by topic, it divides up by readership. This is something that people stumble over, but if you look at all of the site descriptions in the drop-down list of "Stack Exchange communities" at the top of this very page you'll see that all of the communities are described in terms of the people that read and write the questions and answers, not in terms of the subject matters.

It takes a while to spot this, especially if one has a background in the likes of CompuServe, Fidonet, Usenet, I-Link, and so forth, which did divide up by topic, and whose FAQ documents did as well. But it is how things are structured by the company that runs the sites, and is the methodology that one can see all the way back to 2009 (where the question was "Which community do you consider yourself a part of?") if one goes and looks.

This WWW site is "for users" of Unices and Linux-based operating systems. Stack Overflow is "for programmers".

So the correct approach is to consider the readership.

If an answer is aimed at a user of the operating system, then it is appropriate. It seems to be surely the case that one-liners in many of the interpreted languages that one can commonly (and even as standard in some cases) find on Unices and Linux-based operating systems, are usable by users. Conversely, a question or an answer that is for programmers is better on Stack Overflow.

I for one would object to any notion that everything outwith grep, sed, and awk was outwith the scope of using these operating systems. It is both narrowminded and blinkered, and definitely not in accord with my experience as a user. Indeed, a lot of the history of Unices has been the expansion to include all sorts of useful tools that users can employ, from perl through rs and jq to Miller. This is, moreover, a process that is ongoing today.

So your question is ill-founded to an extent. It is not the case that there is a set of on-topic and off-topic programming languages. It is, rather, whether a question and an answer is appropriate for a readership of users.

There is an observable widespread tendency to give an awk answer to almost everything, but that should not be inferred as a rule to be followed, and if there's (say) a Python answer that involves less programming then surely that is quite on point as an answer for a readership of users.

I went against the grain, applying other tools that people have written over the years to directly perform the job at hand which do not involve entering a program for awk or a shell to run, with answers like https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/574309/5132 and https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/578242/5132 . Others have done similar. https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/584274/5132 and https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/569600/5132 are (for examples) answers that show alternative tools to answers employing shell script and (yet again) awk programs, namely John A. Kunze's jot and rs (reshape), which have been around since 4.2BSD for goodness' sake!

Similarly, it's not about which section number a library function has assigned to it. It's about whether the Q&A is for programmers or for users. Knowing that there's wacky semantics to the (Linux) settimeofday() system call that make the system time jump around at bootstrap is something that concerns users, especially when it affects things like filesystem checks (c.f. https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/600490/5132). But whether one can pass a time_t to settimeofday() is a question for programmers (c.f. https://stackoverflow.com/q/3374659/340790). It's the same system call, but two different readerships.

Answer 3

This is a site for Unix/Linux questions.

If they are about programming, then so is it. The requirement is that it has to be Unix/Linux related. There is no requirement about any language/platform, but also none of them is forbidden.

Simple script languages identified commonly with the Unix world (bash, awk, sed, etc) are imho per definitionem on-topic.

Also per definitionem on-topic if a question is about a Posix APIs (or the system APIs provided by any Unix-related system). These questions are most likely asked in C, but it does not make any specific privilege to the C language.

However, the most common programming questions asked on the StackOverflow are today all in highly platform-independent languages: Java, Javascript, Python. These questions are obviously off-topic, except if they are very clearly about some Unix/Linux-specific thing (for example, OP wants to distribute signals to a multi-threaded python process). This happens very rarely, because the practical problems happening about them are mostly not relate to any OS et al. Thus, these questions are very rare here.