18 Nov
2021
18 Nov
'21
6:35 a.m.
I'll defend perl, at least perl4, vigorously. I wrote a lot of code in
it on 20mhz SPARCs. Yeah, like any kitchen sink language you have to
develop a style, but it is possible. All of Solaris 2.0 development
happened under a source management system I wrote, NSElite, that was
almost 100% perl4. There was one C program, that Marc might like,
that took 2 SCCS files that had the initial part of the graph in
common but the recent nodes were different in each file, and zippered
them together into a new SCCS file that had the newer nodes on a
branch. It was F.A.S.T compared to the edit/delta cycles you'd
do if you did it by hand.
My perl4 was maintainable, I fixed bugs in it quickly.
When it happened, perl4 was a God send, as much as I love awk, perl
was far more useful for stuff that awk just didn't want to handle.
On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 09:21:49AM +1100, Rob Pike wrote:
Perl certainly had its detractors, but for a few years
there it was the
lingua franca of system administration.
-rob
On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 8:21 AM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> 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:
>>
>>> On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 11:35 AM Norman Wilson <norman(a)oclsc.org>
wrote:
>>>
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> It's what paved the way for python to fill that gap...
>>
>
> 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.
>
>
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm