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From: Sebastian <sebastian@here.com.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2024 07:31:13 -0000 (UTC)
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In comp.unix.programmer Muttley@dastartdlyhq.org wrote:
> 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 syntax??, 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.

I think you've identified the one language that Python is better than.