On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 3:54 PM Warner Losh wrote: > On Wed, Nov 17, 2021, 1:48 PM Dan Stromberg wrote: > >> On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 11:35 AM Norman Wilson 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.