[TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]

[Larry McVoy]

All the time.  A merge in BitKeeper (which is SCCS based, I rewrote SCCS
from scratch and evolved it quite a bit) is just a 

get -e -ir1,r2,r3,r4

where the include list is all the revs on the branch being merged.

That's the beauty of SCCS that seems to be lost to the rest of the
world:  if someone added N bytes on the branch, the merge passes that
to the trunk by *reference*, every other SCM that is in current use
copies the branch data to the trunk.

Suppose Rob had done a bunch of important work on the branch, you had
done some work on the trunk, and for whatever reason, I merged Rob's
work.  Let's say everything automerged.  In SCCS or BitKeeper, the only
new data in the file is a merge node that says "Include all of Rob's
work".  In all other systems in use today, there would be a merge node
with another copy of Rob's work with me as the author because I did
the merge.  Blech.

Strangely enough, ClearCase has a weave format like SCCS and they could
have done merges by reference and they choose to copy it.  I dunno who
the idiot was that made that decision.

On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 03:04:37PM -0500, Alan Glasser wrote:
> 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
> >

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm