Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages

On Mon, 08 Apr 2024 17:54:42 +0000, Javier wrote:

Also, I suspect HD caching and the increase in HD speed was one of the
reasons for the fall in popularity of Perl for writing small system
automation tasks that could be done with just shell.  But there were
another reasons, like the disapearance of diversity in the Unix OS
ecosystem.

Systems that can legally be called “Unix®” may be essentially extinct, but
Linux on its own offers more diversity than they could manage, anyway.

And yes, Perl may not be the Hot New Thing™, but it still lives on.

On my Debian system:

    ldo@theon:~> apt-cache rdepends perl | sort | uniq | wc -l
    1115

Perl made easy to write portable scripts that could run on propietary
Unixen that came with slight incompatibilities in the command line tools
(IRIX/Solaris/HP-UX/AIX, etc.)

I thought the usual way any self-respecting Unix sysadmin fixed that
problem was by installing the GNU tools.