[TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]

[Dan Cross]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 3:54 PM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 17, 2021, 1:48 PM Dan Stromberg <drsalists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 11:35 AM Norman Wilson <norman at 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.
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