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

[Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com>]

Douglas McIlroy writes:
> > My belief is that perl was written to replace a lot of Unix pipelines,
>
> I understand Perl's motive to have been a lot like PL/I's: subsume
> several popular styles of programming in one language. PL/I's ensemble
> wasn't always harmonious. Perl's was cacophony.

Perl was nice in its early years as it was much more capable than awk.
I understood its original intent to be a better glue language.  While
I find the syntax to be ugly, that's not where I hit a Wall.  To me,
the thing that makes Perl a bad language is the magic side effects left
in things like _0 from many operations.  This is stuff that one is not
likely to remember unless it's used every day.  I think that it's why
so many consider Perl to be write-only; too many magic implicit things
instead of being explicit.  I understand that compactness was a big
deal 40 years ago but no longer.