4 Jan
2023
4 Jan
'23
3 p.m.
On Jan 2, 2023, at 15:59, Jon Steinhart
<jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
segaloco via TUHS writes:
I used to think this was a somewhat modern thing, at least evident by atrocities performed
by tcl & perl in the 1990s. But exposure to this group of weirdos has made me realize
that somewhat terrifying amounts of “infrastructure” code is built on little languages
like awk or ed scripts. And that any criticism of the horrible things I use Ruby for today
only really defends the place for awk and sed that those now hold and where they truly
excel.
But then I read https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/qed.html
I think that's a good point that scripting
problems may be
a symptom of the nature of the tools being used in them.
To the best of my recollection, scripting languages were originally
intended and used for the automation of repetitive personal tasks;
making it easier for users who found themselves typing the same
stuff over and over again. Somewhere along the line people forgot
how to use a compiler and began writing large systems in a variety
of roughly equivalent but incompatible interpreted languages. For a brief period in the 1970s, the GECOS QED served
us as a scripting language; it was in some ways analogous to the Awk or Perl of today. It
was used for such tasks as submitting batch jobs, formatting files for the printer,
collecting statistics on a file. A collection of macros to do various useful tasks was put
in a commonly available place.
I truly hope in my heart of hearts that ken had no inkling that someday QED would be used
as the scripting language to power http://www.qef.com/html/quickref.html. Not that QEF is
bad, just that any stones thrown at “you shouldn’t use $lang for that!” feel like they
must only strike via ricochet off QEF.
I can only imagine the shock and horror Larry McVoy would experience if one of his team
suggested replacing make with QEF.