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From: John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2024 07:55:47 -0700
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On Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:01:43 +0000
Javier <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> It certainly encourages the writing of small modular tools.  The
> downside is the loss of performance because of disk access for trivial
> things like 'nfiles=$(ls | wc -l)'.  I suspect disk access times where
> one of the reasons for the development of perl in the early 90s.

You really want either built-ins for a lot of basic commands, or a good
scheme for caching commonly-used executables. AmigaDOS (a TriPOS
derivative) made it pretty trivial to set up a RAM disk and add that to
the search path, which made a big difference in performance since
almost nothing was built-in. Wouldn't be hard to do in *nix-land,
either, but it's an open question whether you'd gain anything over
modern generalized disk caching.