17 Nov
2021
17 Nov
'21
12:04 a.m.
On Tue, Nov 16, 2021 at 09:54:16AM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
Douglas McIlroy writes:
My belief is that perl was written to replace a lot of Unix pipelines,
which are awesome when you discover them but less awesome as they become
complex (error handling in a pipeline is pretty tricky if you actually
want to handle stuff nicely).
I was a huge fan of Perl 4, still am, wrote a source management system
in it while at Sun. It wanted you to be pretty disciplined in how you
wrote it or it becomes write only, but if you are, it was really pleasant.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
APL is a fascinating invention, but can be so
compact as to be
inscrutable. (I confess not to have practiced APL enough to become
fluent.) In the same vein, Haskell's powerful higher-level functions
make middling fragments of code very clear, but can compress large
code to opacity. Jeremy Gibbons, a high priest of functional
programming, even wrote a paper about deconstructing such wonders for
improved readability.
Wasn't Perl created to fill this void?