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From: Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@talktalk.net>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages
Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2024 11:38:29 +0100
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Muttley@DastartdlyHQ.org writes:
> On Sun, 13 Oct 2024 21:33:56 +0100
> Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@talktalk.net> boring babbled:
>>Muttley@DastartdlyHQ.org writes:
>>> ITYF the people who dislike Perl are the ones who actually like the unix
>>> way of having simple daisychained tools instead of some lump of a language
>>> that does everything messily.
>>
>>Perl is a general-purpose programming language, just like C or Java (or
>>Python or Javascript or Rust or $whatnot). This means it can be used to
>>implement anything (with some practical limitation for anything) and not
>>that it "does everything".
>
> I can be , but generally isn't. Its niche tends to be text processing of
> some sort

It is. That sysadmin-types using it don't use it to create actual
programs is of no concern for this, because they never do that and this
use only needs a very small subset of the features of the language. I've
been using it as system programming language for programs with up to
21,000 LOC in the main program (and some more thousands in auxiliary
modules) and it's very well-suited to that.

The simple but flexible OO system, reliable automatic memory management
and support for functions/ subroutine as first-class objects make it
very nice for implementing event-driven, asynchronous "crossbar"
programs connecting various external entities both running locallly and
on other computers on the internet to create complex applications from
them.