18 Nov
2021
18 Nov
'21
3:17 a.m.
On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 3:54 PM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
On Wed, Nov 17, 2021, 1:48 PM Dan Stromberg
<drsalists(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I feel that Perl, and to a lesser extent Tcl, opened the floodgates for a
number of relatively lightweight "scripting" languages that sat between C
and the shell in terms of their functionality and expressive power. From
that group, the one I liked best was Ruby, but it got hijacked by Rails and
Python swooped in and stole its thunder.
- Dan C.
On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 11:35 AM Norman Wilson
<norman(a)oclsc.org> wrote:
It's what paved the way for python to fill that gap...
Wasn't Perl created to fill this void?
Void? I thought Perl was created to fill a much-needed gap.
There was and is a need for something to sit between Shell and C. But it
needn't be filled by Perl.
The chief problem with Perl, as I see it, is it's like 10 languages
smashed together. To write it, you only need to know one of the 10. But
to read it, you never know what subset you're going to see until you're
deep in the code.
Perl is the victim of an experiment in exuberant, Opensource design,
where the bar to adding a new feature was troublingly low.
It was undeniably influential.