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That's an interesting trick, I'll bear it in mind. That said, the "lottery factor" is often a bigger contributor to the things that land in codebases than "opt
by mdaniel 5y ago
That's an interesting trick, I'll bear it in mind.
That said, the "lottery factor" is often a bigger contributor to the things that land in codebases than "optimality". Plus, I've actually seen somewhere that perl is the most common binary across every system, and it's likely a larger population who know perl than ed would be my guess
- gnubison 5y agoPerl more common than vi? The study you’re remembering probably didn’t include POSIX utilities.
- mdaniel 5y agoWith the full understanding that "docker images" are their own special little things: $ docker run --rm ubuntu:22.04 bash -c 'command -v ex; command -v ed; command -v vi; command -v perl;' /usr/bin/perl and the same result for "debian:stable" --- edit: I just realized that's because apt is _written in_ perl, but tomato, tomahto, and it may very well be that they picked perl for that same universal-binary reason
- gnubison 5y agoHuh, interesting.
- bradknowles 5y agoWith Perl, you can't just say "Perl", you have to be specific to which version of Perl.
- jwilk 5y agoWhat do you mean?
- bradknowles 5y agoHow many major versions of Perl do you know about? What is the distribution of these different versions of Perl across various OSes and OS versions? Hint: Lots of backward-incompatible changes tend to get made around different major versions. Having Perl 4 is not like having Perl 5 which is not like Perl 6.
- jwilk 5y agoI still don't know what your point is. Are there any contemporary distros that have the "perl" exectuable that is not Perl 5?
- bradknowles 5y agoIf you want to claim broad compatibility, you can't just look at the latest distributions. You have to look at OSes other than Linux. You have to look at older versions of OSes, too. And don't forget the billions of embedded and handheld devices, too.
- gnubison 5y ago> You have to look at older versions of OSes, too. Perl 5 was released in 1994. It is incredibly portable. If you have a system that legitimately has Perl 4, I would love to hear about it, but …