[TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2021 at 12:55 PM Richard Salz <rich.salz at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> My belief is that perl was written to replace a lot of Unix pipelines,
>>
>
> This is true.  I heard it from Larry himself :)
>

It's certainly what his posts from the time said: Perl was written to cope
with the hodge-podge
of awk / sed / etc scripts that grew in complexity, but not quite having
the power to solve
the problems past a certain point in complexity in an understandable,
digestible way. Perl
was designed to provide an 'all of the above' language that gave a better
framework to
the pipelining and data processing and transformation than shell + sed +
awk could with
its disparate utilities.

One can debate the extent to which these goals were fulfilled, of course,
but that's
what Larry was saying on USENET in the late 80s.

Warner
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