[COFF] [TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]

[Bakul Shah]

On Nov 17, 2021, at 2:31 PM, Adam Thornton <athornton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 3:24 PM Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:
> Perl certainly had its detractors, but for a few years there it was the lingua franca of system administration.
> 
> It's still what I reach for first when I need to write a state machine that processes a file made up of lines with some--or some set of--structures.  The integration of regexps is far, far, far superior to what Python can do, and I adore the while(<>) construct.  Maintaining other people's Perl usually sucks, but it's a very easy way to solve your own little problems.

[Random tangent] you can tell when a programmer first started
seriously programming by the tools or languages they reach for
first!

Perl used to be very popular in hardware verification. May still
be. And that has to do with when *verification* became a serious
activity. Just as machine learning mostly uses python as it
sort of came of age when Python was all the rage. Just Go became
populat with cloud computing with Kubernetes and all! So you
can also tell when an computing subgenre became popular by their
language of choice!