4 ms·
Rob Pike, one of Unix's co-creators, and owner of quite a sharp tongue, put it best in a Slashdot interview: "Those days [of the Unix Philosophy] are dead and
by AceJohnny2 5y ago
Rob Pike, one of Unix's co-creators, and owner of quite a sharp tongue, put it best in a Slashdot interview:
"Those days [of the Unix Philosophy] are dead and gone, and the eulogy was delivered by Perl."
https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike-responds https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-p...
- fsckboy 5y agook sure, but unix is still here and perl died there's a subtle thing about perl that's not mentioned often, which is how it borrowed ideas from many other tools and that made perl "intuitive" to learn for people who knew the other tools. But once you're embedded in just perl for awhile, you forget the other tools and then perl's grab-bag of borrowed ideas becomes sort of burdensome, it loses "intuitiveness".
- anthk 5y agoPerl didn't die. Perl superseded awk.
- AceJohnny2 5y agoOnly after I had to do some non-trival Bash scripting did I stop hating Perl's syntax. For one thing, at least Perl wasn't as bad as Bash. For another, I now understood where Perl came from! Perl's syntax is a relic of its time, and it blazed a trail for what to do (and what to avoid!) in later scripting languages.
- oblio 5y agoPerl itself died. But Perl's philosophy of batteries included and do almost everything in a single language won. If anything, Perl killed classic Unix and much of the Unix philosophy. Every major modern design looks more like Perl than like Unix: Python, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, Java, C#, Swift, Go, Rust, etc. They're all "batteries included".