Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2021 at 09:54:16AM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> Douglas McIlroy writes:
> > APL is a fascinating invention, but can be so compact as to be
> > inscrutable. (I confess not to have practiced APL enough to become
> > fluent.) In the same vein, Haskell's powerful higher-level functions
> > make middling fragments of code very clear, but can compress large
> > code to opacity. Jeremy Gibbons, a high priest of functional
> > programming, even wrote a paper about deconstructing such wonders for
> > improved readability.
> 
> Wasn't Perl created to fill this void?

My belief is that perl was written to replace a lot of Unix pipelines,
which are awesome when you discover them but less awesome as they become
complex (error handling in a pipeline is pretty tricky if you actually
want to handle stuff nicely).

I was a huge fan of Perl 4, still am, wrote a source management system 
in it while at Sun.  It wanted you to be pretty disciplined in how you
wrote it or it becomes write only, but if you are, it was really pleasant.
-- 
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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm