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From: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
To: Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com>
Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2021 16:35:12 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20211118003512.GN15051@mcvoy.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAKzdPgyY1eW8O=ky5_88kP7Z0EKC1E2TjDyi4tKkzG0hfooSHw@mail.gmail.com>

I'll defend perl, at least perl4, vigorously.  I wrote a lot of code in
it on 20mhz SPARCs.  Yeah, like any kitchen sink language you have to
develop a style, but it is possible.  All of Solaris 2.0 development
happened under a source management system I wrote, NSElite, that was
almost 100% perl4.  There was one C program, that Marc might like,
that took 2 SCCS files that had the initial part of the graph in 
common but the recent nodes were different in each file, and zippered
them together into a new SCCS file that had the newer nodes on a 
branch.  It was F.A.S.T compared to the edit/delta cycles you'd 
do if you did it by hand.

My perl4 was maintainable, I fixed bugs in it quickly.

When it happened, perl4 was a God send, as much as I love awk, perl 
was far more useful for stuff that awk just didn't want to handle.

On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 09:21:49AM +1100, Rob Pike wrote:
> Perl certainly had its detractors, but for a few years there it was the
> lingua franca of system administration.
> 
> -rob
> 
> 
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 8:21 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 3:54 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On Wed, Nov 17, 2021, 1:48 PM Dan Stromberg <drsalists@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 11:35 AM Norman Wilson <norman@oclsc.org> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Wasn't Perl created to fill this void?
> >>>>
> >>>> Void? I thought Perl was created to fill a much-needed gap.
> >>>>
> >>> There was and is a need for something to sit between Shell and C.  But
> >>> it needn't be filled by Perl.
> >>>
> >>> The chief problem with Perl, as I see it, is it's like 10 languages
> >>> smashed together.  To write it, you only need to know one of the 10.  But
> >>> to read it, you never know what subset you're going to see until you're
> >>> deep in the code.
> >>>
> >>> Perl is the victim of an experiment in exuberant, Opensource design,
> >>> where the bar to adding a new feature was troublingly low.
> >>>
> >>> It was undeniably influential.
> >>>
> >>
> >> It's what paved the way for python to fill that gap...
> >>
> >
> > I feel that Perl, and to a lesser extent Tcl, opened the floodgates for a
> > number of relatively lightweight "scripting" languages that sat between C
> > and the shell in terms of their functionality and expressive power. From
> > that group, the one I liked best was Ruby, but it got hijacked by Rails and
> > Python swooped in and stole its thunder.
> >
> >         - Dan C.
> >
> >

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

  reply	other threads:[~2021-11-18  0:38 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 36+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-11-16 17:00 [TUHS] Book Recommendation Douglas McIlroy
2021-11-16 17:54 ` [TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ] Jon Steinhart
2021-11-16 17:57   ` Ron Natalie
2021-11-16 18:00   ` Dan Cross
2021-11-16 18:04   ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-16 19:53     ` Richard Salz
2021-11-16 20:05       ` Warner Losh
2021-11-17 19:12   ` Norman Wilson
2021-11-17 20:46     ` Dan Stromberg
2021-11-17 20:52       ` Warner Losh
2021-11-17 21:17         ` Dan Cross
2021-11-17 22:21           ` Rob Pike
2021-11-18  0:35             ` Larry McVoy [this message]
2021-11-19 20:04               ` Alan Glasser
2021-11-19 20:14                 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-19 21:48                   ` Alan Glasser
2021-11-19 22:28                     ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-19 23:17               ` Alan Glasser
2021-11-18 21:03             ` George Michaelson
2021-11-18 21:39               ` Rob Pike
2021-11-17 22:36     ` Bakul Shah
2021-11-18  0:56       ` Dan Stromberg
     [not found] ` <CAKH6PiXinxBQGRqoeGMcG9CwTA5BNeU-LY164f-ZLYA4obsyuA@mail.g mail.com>
2021-11-16 18:47   ` [TUHS] Book Recommendation John Foust via TUHS
2021-11-16 20:35 ` Bakul Shah
2021-12-02 21:35 ` Duncan Mak
2021-12-02 22:32   ` Bakul Shah
2021-12-02 22:34   ` Rob Pike
2021-11-16 19:29 [TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ] Douglas McIlroy
2021-11-16 19:54 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-11-18 18:47 Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
2021-11-18 19:03 ` arnold
2021-11-18 19:16   ` Chet Ramey
2021-11-18 19:20     ` arnold
2021-11-18 21:03   ` John Cowan
2021-11-18 21:42 ` Rich Morin
2021-11-18 22:59 Nelson H. F. Beebe

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