Interesting use of the past tense. I like to think this remains in the past tense but I keep walking into sysadmin tasks where its (regrettably ?) present. G On Thu, 18 Nov 2021, 8:24 am 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 wrote: > >> 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. >> >>