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From: Bozo User <anthk@disroot.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 20:04:54 -0000 (UTC)
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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 steroids”. 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.