[COFF] What languges would you like to learn?

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 07:41:32PM -0800, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Dec 26, 2019, at 1:37 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > 
> > On Fri, Dec 27, 2019 at 07:28:27AM +1000, David Arnold wrote:
> >> C++ is several different languages in one compiler. 
> > 
> > Bingo, well said.  I find kitchen sink languages like that awful.
> > It's not what you put in, it's what you don't let in.
> 
> Wait... I thought you liked Perl? :-)

I really liked perl4.  Perl past that not so much, perl5 solved one or
two problem that perl4 had but then added a boat load of new problems.
I never warmed up to perl5.

But perl4 felt like all the goodness from sed, all the goodness from
awk, and a general purpose programming language to boot.  I actually
proposed, in the late 1980's, that Sun should consider rewriting a
bunch of /usr/bin in perl.  A little crazy in the days of 20mhz 
machines but I thought they would be more maintainable.

Perl4 wasn't a kitchen sink language, it was pulling from all of
Unix stuff that was useful.  There really wasn't a lot in perl4
that wasn't in ksh/sed/awk.  There was stuff like

	while (<>) {
		whatever
	}

that did the work to either get it from STDIN or walk argv and get the
input from there.  I actually liked that, seemed like progress.

--lm