From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Thu, 26 Dec 2019 20:00:43 -0800 Subject: [COFF] What languges would you like to learn? In-Reply-To: References: <9DDB7EE9-8E8E-4083-BB36-B15CD784FC3C@pobox.com> <20191226213703.GN3839@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20191227040043.GP3839@mcvoy.com> On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 07:41:32PM -0800, Bakul Shah wrote: > On Dec 26, 2019, at 1:37 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: > > > > On Fri, Dec 27, 2019 at 07:28:27AM +1000, David Arnold wrote: > >> 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. > > Wait... I thought you liked Perl? :-) 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