4 ms·

We didn’t all converge to perl. Some of us avoided it like the plague. I saw some reference to CPAN recently and it made me feel… uncomfortable. Whatever thing

We didn’t all converge to perl. Some of us avoided it like the plague. I saw some reference to CPAN recently and it made me feel… uncomfortable. Whatever things I couldn’t do in sh or Awk, I would do in C.

dale_glass 4y ago
Good lord, why? Seriously, Perl is an okay language for quick and dirty things of a tiny/small size. Yeah, it's not the best language for a large development project, but if you do need to parse /etc/passwd or something, not only it's perfectly good as-is, but you'll certainly find something on CPAN that already does it well. I can't imagine why would one want to do that kind of thing in C. It's just unnecessarily painful, and you'll spend 90% of the time on doing things that don't solve the actual task you need to be solved. Yeah, in modern times it's gone way downhill, but that's mostly if you intend to do something big with it. I wouldn't use it to start a new, fully featured CMS. But for sysadmin type stuff as an alternative to sh/awk it's still just as usable as ever.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  I know loads of people loved Perl, and I'm not suggesting that my perspective is mainstream or even defensible. I'm just saying that I was a young sysadmin in the "bad old days", but that I didn't like Perl. Of course I did use an awful lot of Perl scripts. That said, I have to revise my original comment. I forgot that I was a big fan of Tcl/Tk/Expect back in the day. So it's not like my taste is better than anyone else's :)
sramsay 4y ago
Greybeard here. Just blogged about this very topic a couple of weeks ago: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Awk” https://stephenramsay.net/posts/unreasonable-awk.html https://stephenramsay.net/posts/unreasonable-awk.html
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  Nice! You could also use BEGIN { FS = “: “ } Which sets the field separator. This would put the keywords into $2 and remove the need for the gensubs :)
  - sramsay 4y ago
    Well, look at that. Thanks!
  - yesenadam 4y ago
    It's much shorter to set the field separator with an option: awk -F": " or awk -F ": " do the same thing.
- MrVandemar 4y ago
  In both your essays, you have some text surrounded by square brackets: are these intentded to render out as hyperlinks?
  - sramsay 4y ago
    Yes. Are they not!?
    - MrVandemar 4y ago
      They are now. Some of them weren't. Maybe it was a local error for me. Or maybe PEBCAK. Anyway, cool blog. I'm reading it.

dale_glass 4y ago

Good lord, why? Seriously, Perl is an okay language for quick and dirty things of a tiny/small size. Yeah, it's not the best language for a large development project, but if you do need to parse /etc/passwd or something, not only it's perfectly good as-is, but you'll certainly find something on CPAN that already does it well. I can't imagine why would one want to do that kind of thing in C. It's just unnecessarily painful, and you'll spend 90% of the time on doing things that don't solve the actual task you need to be solved. Yeah, in modern times it's gone way downhill, but that's mostly if you intend to do something big with it. I wouldn't use it to start a new, fully featured CMS. But for sysadmin type stuff as an alternative to sh/awk it's still just as usable as ever.

doctor_eval 4y ago
I know loads of people loved Perl, and I'm not suggesting that my perspective is mainstream or even defensible. I'm just saying that I was a young sysadmin in the "bad old days", but that I didn't like Perl. Of course I did use an awful lot of Perl scripts. That said, I have to revise my original comment. I forgot that I was a big fan of Tcl/Tk/Expect back in the day. So it's not like my taste is better than anyone else's :)

sramsay 4y ago

Greybeard here. Just blogged about this very topic a couple of weeks ago: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Awk” https://stephenramsay.net/posts/unreasonable-awk.html https://stephenramsay.net/posts/unreasonable-awk.html

doctor_eval 4y ago
Nice! You could also use BEGIN { FS = “: “ } Which sets the field separator. This would put the keywords into $2 and remove the need for the gensubs :)
- sramsay 4y ago
  Well, look at that. Thanks!
- yesenadam 4y ago
  It's much shorter to set the field separator with an option: awk -F": " or awk -F ": " do the same thing.
MrVandemar 4y ago
In both your essays, you have some text surrounded by square brackets: are these intentded to render out as hyperlinks?
- sramsay 4y ago
  Yes. Are they not!?
  - MrVandemar 4y ago
    They are now. Some of them weren't. Maybe it was a local error for me. Or maybe PEBCAK. Anyway, cool blog. I'm reading it.