Programming

If you work in bash and don’t like python, maybe it’s too strict. Look into Ruby. It was inspired by Perl. I found it more to my style in that there are many correct solutions and not one implied correct solution.

It was just a recommendation. If you feel like python isn't for you, you can try any other language and the only difference will be how much time it'll take to make it, but otherwise you can use C if you want. Maybe you're so used to low level programming like managing memory and having to declare types everywhere that python dumb proof approach is difficult for you. Just don't think too hard about it, if it's a personal use script then there's no need to think about it's efficiency or ugliness. If it works, it works.

If you have experience with COBOL why use anything else?

I hear it's very popular and nice to use.

Python is basically runnable pseudo code that you would write on a napkin to explain stuff to somebody. There you don't care about curly backets and naturally indent to show scope. It's way simpler C and if you want to, you can add type hints (aka faux static typing).

Package management is done with pip although nowadays poetry is better as it uses one file to define everything about your project and configure the tools (linter, tester, autoformatter, static type checking)

The advantage of python is that it has lots and lots of libraries. You don't need to fiddle around with the lemmy API - use a library:

• https://pypi.org/project/pylemmy/ - slightly newer
• https://pypi.org/project/Lemmy.py/ - looks abandoned but might suit your needs

Want to connect to musicbrainz? https://pypi.org/project/musicbrainzngs/ is probably the best.

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Create a virtual env (basically allows you to install all your project dependencies in an environment separate from the global one): python3 -m venv .venv.

Activate the virtual in your shell source .venv/bin/activate.

Now you can start installing dependencies. If you want it super simple, use pip install $package, but updating the list of packages you want in your project is manual: pip freeze > requirements.txt (install them again with pip install -r requirements.txt after rm -rf .venv should you want to start fresh) and you can run into problems with clashing dependencies.
So, I recommend using poetry pip install poetry. poetry new . to setup basic project structure, then add runtime dependencies with poetry add $package e.g poetry add pylemmy musicbrainzngs.

It's possible to add dev dependencies with poetry like ruff for linting and autoformatting your code and mypy for static type checking. Your unit tests can be written using unittest from the standard library.

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Another (mostly) retired Unix sysadmin here. I never could make Python work in my brain, but last year discovered Svelte/SvelteKit and really like it. I'd always kinda hated on JS, but actually it's pretty nice these days.