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From: Rich <rich@example.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Joy of this, Joy of that
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2024 14:33:39 -0000 (UTC)
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Louis Krupp <lkrupp@invalid.pssw.com.invalid> wrote:
> On 11/23/2024 4:16 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>> On 23/11/2024 04:57, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>>    Well ...  glad to see my opinion of Perl is    not unique  :-)
>>>
>>>    Way back I bought the usual "Learn Perl" book with    the camel 
>>> on the front.  About two chapters in I    said "WHY ???".
>>>
>> I just saw the type of people who created enormous scripts in it, 
>> and thought 'total wankers' They typically read instruction manuals 
>> as a hobby...
>>
>> If a script gets that big it should be in a different language 
>> altogether.
>>
> There was a time when Python was still at version 1.something, Ruby 
> hadn't been introduced, so the choices were limited to shells (like 
> sh and its relatives), compiled languages like C, and Perl.  Perl did 
> the job, and it was enough like C to seem familiar, so here we are.

This is the part that seems to get forgotten most often today, given 
the fog of history.

There was a day, in the not so distant past, where one's choices for 
'language' for "custom ad. hoc. tool" on a Unix machine were:

1) C
2) /bin/sh
3) Perl

And, if "custom ad. hoc. tool" needed to do any manipulation of 
string data beyond the most trivial of output printf'ing then the code 
overhead in C for handing those strings vs. one line of Perl, meant 
Perl got called in to do the jobs that were "too much for /bin/sh" and 
"not performance critical enough (yet)" to write out all the needed C 
code.