[TUHS] Re: A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Joseph Holsten <joseph@josephholsten.com>]

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> On Jan 2, 2023, at 15:59, Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> segaloco via TUHS writes:
>> I think that's a good point that scripting problems may be
>> a symptom of the nature of the tools being used in them.
> 
> To the best of my recollection, scripting languages were originally
> intended and used for the automation of repetitive personal tasks;
> making it easier for users who found themselves typing the same
> stuff over and over again.  Somewhere along the line people forgot
> how to use a compiler and began writing large systems in a variety
> of roughly equivalent but incompatible interpreted languages. 

I used to think this was a somewhat modern thing, at least evident by atrocities performed by tcl & perl in the 1990s. But exposure to this group of weirdos has made me realize that somewhat terrifying amounts of “infrastructure” code is built on little languages like awk or ed scripts. And that any criticism of the horrible things I use Ruby for today only really defends the place for awk and sed that those now hold and where they truly excel.

But then I read https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/qed.html

> For a brief period in the 1970s, the GECOS QED served us as a scripting language; it was in some ways analogous to the Awk or Perl of today. It was used for such tasks as submitting batch jobs, formatting files for the printer, collecting statistics on a file. A collection of macros to do various useful tasks was put in a commonly available place.

I truly hope in my heart of hearts that ken had no inkling that someday QED would be used as the scripting language to power http://www.qef.com/html/quickref.html. Not that QEF is bad, just that any stones thrown at “you shouldn’t use $lang for that!” feel like they must only strike via ricochet off QEF.

I can only imagine the shock and horror Larry McVoy would experience if one of his team suggested replacing make with QEF. 

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