[TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]

[Rob Pike]

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 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20211118/7bac081a/attachment.htm>