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.