Brandon Mitchell wrote:
Fellow RLUG'ers,
This flash from the recent past showed up on reddit today. Even if
you're interested in niether Lisp nor goat vomit, it always provides a
good read. Take heart all you silly *cough*C++*cough* programmers out
there! ;-)
http://www.underlevel.net/jordan/erik-perl.txt
I'm putting that in the 'unlearned criticism file':
"I once studied perl enough to read perl code and spot bugs in other
people's programs..."
If yer handed a data dump from a 70's era mainframe, or a flat text file
from another old database (dbase, pick, whatever), you are going to want
perl.
You can certainly write such code in any other language, and in some
cases, you can use libraries which have perl-inspired functionality to
do the same thing, but in essence you are doing what perl is/was so
influential for doing...
I think part of the misunderstanding here is that perl is not designed
to be the best language out there for any apparent task, but rather the
language that is most familiar and easy to adopt by most people in
industry. If you are a C programmer, you'll be able to use
C-constructs.. if you are a pascal programmer, you will be able to do
the same, etc... This is anethma to any "bondage & domination" type
programmer.
Many language designers try to find the most powerful way to express a
solution to a problem, while Larry Wall seems to say "screw it, anything
goes!".
When he signs one of his perl books, he explicitly writes on the cover
'there is more than one way to do it in...' just before the Perl monicker.
I don't use perl much anymore... mainly just to pull data structures out
of annoying text files to hand off to more sophisticated languages, or
perhaps as socket server prototypes... I think most of the best uses for
perl are reasonably covered by other languages/libraries nowadays, so
there's some choice.
--
If UNIX doesn't have the solution you have the wrong problem.
UNIX is simple, but it takes a genius to understand it's simplicity.
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