Path: ...!news.nobody.at!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Muttley@DastartdlyHQ.org
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2024 08:38:26 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Lines: 37
Message-ID: <ve83q2$33dfe$1@dont-email.me>
References: <uu54la$3su5b$6@dont-email.me> <87edbtz43p.fsf@tudado.org>
	<0d2cnVzOmbD6f4z7nZ2dnZfqnPudnZ2d@brightview.co.uk>
	<uusur7$2hm6p$1@dont-email.me> <vdf096$2c9hb$8@dont-email.me>
 <87a5fdj7f2.fsf@doppelsaurus.mobileactivedefense.com>
Injection-Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2024 10:38:26 +0200 (CEST)
Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="d65fb65922ea715358b074c85545da6a";
	logging-data="3257838"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org";	posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19P1FJrlB1HvTQQb4kxyv/1"
Cancel-Lock: sha1:F61o++hDHMgCv4tzJeorXIRB8wQ=
Bytes: 2767

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 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.
>
>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. Larry took the worst parts of C and shell
syntax and mashed them together. Its no surprise Perl has been ditched in
favour of Python just about everywhere for new scripting projects. And while
I hate Pythons meangingful whitespace nonsense, I'd use it in preference
to Perl any day.