[TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]

[George Michaelson]

Interesting use of the past tense. I like to think this remains in the past
tense but I keep walking into sysadmin tasks where its (regrettably ?)
present.

G

On Thu, 18 Nov 2021, 8:24 am 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.
>
> -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.
>>
>>
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