[TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]

[Alan Glasser]

Larry,

Did you ever try the -i or -x options on get(1) to include or exclude
deltas?

Alan


On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 7:39 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> I'll defend perl, at least perl4, vigorously.  I wrote a lot of code in
> it on 20mhz SPARCs.  Yeah, like any kitchen sink language you have to
> develop a style, but it is possible.  All of Solaris 2.0 development
> happened under a source management system I wrote, NSElite, that was
> almost 100% perl4.  There was one C program, that Marc might like,
> that took 2 SCCS files that had the initial part of the graph in
> common but the recent nodes were different in each file, and zippered
> them together into a new SCCS file that had the newer nodes on a
> branch.  It was F.A.S.T compared to the edit/delta cycles you'd
> do if you did it by hand.
>
> My perl4 was maintainable, I fixed bugs in it quickly.
>
> When it happened, perl4 was a God send, as much as I love awk, perl
> was far more useful for stuff that awk just didn't want to handle.
>
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 09:21:49AM +1100, Rob Pike 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.
> > >
> > >
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>
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