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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
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Subject: Re: Find "py.exe" & copy it to "Python" (flat, no extension).
Date: 12 May 2024 01:41:52 GMT
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On 11 May 2024 21:59:39 GMT, Stéphane CARPENTIER wrote:

> I have really nothing against Perl. It's good and it's useful. As you
> wrote (if I'm not mistaken) in another post, the academic languages are
> not the same as the industry languages. A sysadmin can do great things
> with Perl, but it won't be the most important thing in the job. For a
> programmer, it's just useless.

If there is an example of the non-academic Larry Wall is it, at least as 
far as CS goes. He is a linguist by training and it shows. Like many in 
the field programming was a path to keep beans and rice on the table.

At one time Perl was a popular way to do CGI (not that CGI), particularly 
after Apache added mod_perl that got around spinning up a process for 
every transaction. Being heavily oriented toward text processing it was a 
great fit.

I don't know if it was the first but the DBI presented a uniform interface 
to databases with the messy parts handled by Database Driver modules for 
the specific database. Having worked with DB2, SQL Server, Oracle, and 
SQLite it's amazing how the APIs can appear to be very similar with enough 
landmines to make life interesting.

But, time marched on and Perl didn't. It says a lot that the CGI module 
was removed from the Perl core package as CGI itself became a relic. I 
don't know how much Wall's personal circumstances factored into it. 

I've heard Perl 7 is being worked on but it's nowhere as ambitious as perl 
6 was so it might happen in this decade.