On Sun, 02 Apr 2023 22:42:14 +0200
Michel Verdier <mv...@free.fr> wrote:
>IMO style is perhaps important for development. But libs et regex are
>more important for sysadmin. I use python if a library is there or if I
>need to interface another python program. In example mutagen for
>covering mp3 files. And I use perl everywhere when I need a regex:
>parsing logs and the like. Specially with backref and substitution
>which are painful with python (IMO).
>
That's the whole point IMO, and the question was specifically about
system administration purposes, no clue why Lisp popped up. Or why
Python yet again, not say Ruby, arguably more of an (once) intended
Perl heir. So Perl's basically still around where there's a lot of
ageing "just works" layer and where you don't havy many dependencies or
special needs regarding funky libraries, frameworks, etc. And it can be
mostly for the same reason we're literally keeping hundreds if not
thousands of shell scripts around, full with arcane sed and awk
incantations and whatnot. It's doing the job, so what? Personally I
never really bothered to learn awk, so I'm still using Perl, on a daily
basis in fact, but for exactly the stuff some others would pull out
sed/awk/... Scripting, programming in the very small or what I've seen
Perl being touted to be *meant* for already 30 years ago. The fact at
some point some folks tried, more or less successfully, to make
something else entirely out of it, won't change history. Seems to me
people easily forget this but Perl was intended, created to be a tool.
A text processing tool. Not a language, or environment like Python.
So is it still the first choice for sysadmin work on Linux? Well I
doubt it, I also doubt it ever was. That would be shell. ;)
Still recall some interview from a couple of years ago where Larry Wall
apparently struggled with the Perl 6 thing ("Raku"), and at some point
he said, kind of like it's his last straw, well maybe it's (6) gonna be
the language of the singularity. He didn't really smile, guess he even
shrugged his shoulders, it was quite dry. Was he serious? Who knows,
it's Wall. Turns out though ChatGPT is--as virtually all ML
code--written in Python, that's at least according to Wikipedia and not
too surprising. There you go. Depending on what you make of it, there
may not come much after Python:
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2023/1/267976-the-end-of-programming/fulltext
Be that as it may I don't see much of a reason for learning Perl today
unless you're a die-hard hobbyist with near infinite amount of time
and an undying penchant for obsolete technology.
Oliver
