Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

Louis Krupp <lkrupp@invalid.pssw.com.invalid> wrote:

On 11/23/2024 4:16 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 23/11/2024 04:57, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

   Well ...  glad to see my opinion of Perl is    not unique  :-)
>
   Way back I bought the usual "Learn Perl" book with    the camel
on the front.  About two chapters in I    said "WHY ???".
>

I just saw the type of people who created enormous scripts in it,
and thought 'total wankers' They typically read instruction manuals
as a hobby...
>
If a script gets that big it should be in a different language
altogether.
>

There was a time when Python was still at version 1.something, Ruby
hadn't been introduced, so the choices were limited to shells (like
sh and its relatives), compiled languages like C, and Perl.  Perl did
the job, and it was enough like C to seem familiar, so here we are.

This is the part that seems to get forgotten most often today, given
the fog of history.

There was a day, in the not so distant past, where one's choices for
'language' for "custom ad. hoc. tool" on a Unix machine were:

1) C
2) /bin/sh
3) Perl

And, if "custom ad. hoc. tool" needed to do any manipulation of
string data beyond the most trivial of output printf'ing then the code
overhead in C for handing those strings vs. one line of Perl, meant
Perl got called in to do the jobs that were "too much for /bin/sh" and
"not performance critical enough (yet)" to write out all the needed C
code.