[COFF] What languges would you like to learn?

[bakul at bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah)]

> On Dec 26, 2019, at 8:00 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 07:41:32PM -0800, Bakul Shah wrote:
>> On Dec 26, 2019, at 1:37 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> 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

I'd say it was a *good* kitchen sink! Sort of like CL in some ways :-)

Pretty much all of our chip test code was written in Perl4. We also
used it to generate verilog glue code + CRC code given a polynomial.
And we generated C code for all of Cisco compatible CLI frontend
with context sensitive help and  word completion etc in Perl. And many
other tasks. Perl seemed to be the language of choice for scripting
in '90s. Python started taking over in the '00s.

Even back then I wrote some of my tools in Scheme as I found it easier
and as they were throwaway tools it didn't matter to others.