Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]

[Alan Glasser <alanglasser@gmail.com>]

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My 2 cents on Perl.
Having come up on Ken's original shell, the Mashey shell, the Bourne shell
and the Korn shell (and now bash), and a happy awk (and nawk) programmer, I
mostly avoided perl.  But since many others didn't, I've found myself
needing to read perl code, which as Larry stated "It wanted you to be
pretty disciplined in how you wrote it or it becomes write only, but if you
are, it was really pleasant."  Unfortunately, most open source that I
looked at felt to me like write only.  Also, as Dave stated "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."  Not good for a peruser of perl code (me).  And what's with the
"special" or "magic" variables?  Shades of IBM/OS; not at all Unix-like.
From 1996 until 2013 (when I retired) I was lucky enough to have a Perl
aficionado on my team and he spared me much grief.

Alan


On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 7:39 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> I'll defend perl, at least perl4, vigorously.  I wrote a lot of code in
> it on 20mhz SPARCs.  Yeah, like any kitchen sink language you have to
> develop a style, but it is possible.  All of Solaris 2.0 development
> happened under a source management system I wrote, NSElite, that was
> almost 100% perl4.  There was one C program, that Marc might like,
> that took 2 SCCS files that had the initial part of the graph in
> common but the recent nodes were different in each file, and zippered
> them together into a new SCCS file that had the newer nodes on a
> branch.  It was F.A.S.T compared to the edit/delta cycles you'd
> do if you did it by hand.
>
> My perl4 was maintainable, I fixed bugs in it quickly.
>
> When it happened, perl4 was a God send, as much as I love awk, perl
> was far more useful for stuff that awk just didn't want to handle.
>
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 09:21:49AM +1100, 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 <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.
> > >
> > >
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>

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