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. > >