27 Dec
2019
27 Dec
'19
4 a.m.
On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 07:41:32PM -0800, Bakul Shah wrote:
On Dec 26, 2019, at 1:37 PM, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
I really liked perl4. Perl past that not so much, perl5 solved one or
two problem that perl4 had but then added a boat load of new problems.
I never warmed up to perl5.
But perl4 felt like all the goodness from sed, all the goodness from
awk, and a general purpose programming language to boot. I actually
proposed, in the late 1980's, that Sun should consider rewriting a
bunch of /usr/bin in perl. A little crazy in the days of 20mhz
machines but I thought they would be more maintainable.
Perl4 wasn't a kitchen sink language, it was pulling from all of
Unix stuff that was useful. There really wasn't a lot in perl4
that wasn't in ksh/sed/awk. There was stuff like
while (<>) {
whatever
}
that did the work to either get it from STDIN or walk argv and get the
input from there. I actually liked that, seemed like progress.
--lm
On Fri, Dec 27, 2019 at 07:28:27AM +1000, David Arnold wrote:
Wait... I thought you liked Perl? :-) C++ is several different languages in one
compiler.
Bingo, well said. I find kitchen sink languages like that awful.
It's not what you put in, it's what you don't let in.