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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: Thu, 10 Oct 2024 16:09:49 +0100
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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.