Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages

Muttley@DastartdlyHQ.org writes:

On Wed, 09 Oct 2024 22:25:05 +0100
Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@talktalk.net> boring babbled:

Bozo User <anthk@disroot.org> writes:

On 2024-04-07, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:01:43 +0000, Javier wrote:
>

The downside is the loss of performance because of disk access for
trivial things like 'nfiles=$(ls | wc -l)'.

>
Well, you could save one process creation by writing
“nfiles=$(echo * | wc -l)†instead. But that would still not be

strictly

correct.
>

I suspect disk access times where
one of the reasons for the development of perl in the early 90s.

>
Shells were somewhat less powerful in those days. I would describe the
genesis of Perl as “awk on steroidsâ€. Its big party trick was regular
expressions. And I guess combining that with more sophisticated data-
structuring capabilities.

>
Perl is more awk+sed+sh in a single language. Basically the killer
of the Unix philophy in late 90's/early 00's, and for the good.

>
Perl is a high-level programming language with a rich syntax¹, with
support for deterministic automatic memory management, functions as
first-class objects and message-based OO. It's also a virtual machine
for executing threaded code and a(n optimizing) compiler for translating
Perl code into the corresponding threaded code.

>
Its syntax is also a horrific mess.

Which means precisely what?

Its no surprise Perl has been ditched in favour of Python just about
everywhere for new scripting projects.

"I say so and I'm an avid Phython fan?"

Not much of a reason.

BTW, I didn't mean to start another entirely pointless language
war. Just pointing out the referring to a general-purpose programming
language as "killer of the UNIX philosophy" makes no sense.