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If you write a lot of systems code on Unix in C, write bash scripts, and write awk scripts then Perl largely just makes sense. It takes large chunks from all of
by tankenmate 6y ago
If you write a lot of systems code on Unix in C, write bash scripts, and write awk scripts then Perl largely just makes sense. It takes large chunks from all of the above. So if you don't like UNIX, C, (ba)sh or awk (all of which came from Murray Hill) chances are you won't like Perl either.
- microtherion 6y agoMaybe not so much C, but I saw Perl 4/5 as very attractive for sysadmin-type engineers, because it was pretty much explicitly designed to make onboarding as easy as possible for awk, sh, sed (and BASIC) programmers. Quite a few people I know got started with Perl because they were reasonably comfortable with awk, sh, or sed, started to outgrow their sweet spot, and found that perl provided a very natural transition from each of these languages, could do everything those scripts could do in fairly similar ways, and was obviously more powerful.