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.