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> then people decided perl was bad and moved on from that. That's a large part of what's driving Awk's renaissance: devs that never learned Perl to begin with
by _zagj 3y ago
> then people decided perl was bad and moved on from that.
That's a large part of what's driving Awk's renaissance: devs that never learned Perl to begin with want something to fill the gap between shell and Python, and other devs like me who (reluctantly) abandoned Perl because it was deemed "uncool" by HN types, which means Perl and all code written in it now has an expiration date on it. But since Awk is a POSIX standard, HN types can't get rid of it.
- Almondsetat 3y agocan't wait for the day I will be able to compile Linux without Perl
- fuzztester 3y agothat's the day I'll eat my red hat
- LinuxProtips 3y agoYou can do that right now. Sabotage Linux rewrote the one and only perl dependency in awk years ago. Grab https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sabotage-linux/sabotage/master/KEEP/build_OID_registry https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sabotage-linux/sabotage/ma... and clobber the perl script in the Linux source. Then: sed -i -e 's@perl $(srctree)/$(src)/build_OID_registry@awk -f $(srctree)/$(src)/build_OID_registry@' ./lib/Makefile They also removed the perl dependency for ca-certificates since one of the goals was to remove perl dependencies from the core system including its toolchain and kernel. It's not needed at all now. This Aho project is neat because it has the potential of removing the perl dependency on having a git client, which was a problem prior.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago"HN types" can't get rid of perl either. So just use perl if you want to. Personally I think perl is a terrible language and that anything which is too complex for a shell script (which is most things) should just be done in python. But if you disagree, it's not like anyone can stop you. If your issue is "my teammates hate it and want me to use something else", I promise you they will be just as annoyed if you use awk.
- lanstin 3y agoI'm pretty sure people have read more perl code than awk code, so they'll roll their eyes but will be able to cover for perl-required tasks, but won't build up the courage to touch the awk. To me, hell is having to debug perl scripts other people wrote. Based on experiences in the 1998 time frame.
- dleink 3y agotook a contract job where I was writing a thing in perl to connect a billion dollar collection of ecommerce sites to facebook ads in 2019.
- lanstin 3y agoOMG. I hope the pay was excellent.
- bemusedthrow75 3y agoHell is having to debug perl scripts you wrote yourself long enough ago that you've forgotten and the developers of the packages you depend on have literally died of old age. Because you have only yourself to blame.
- oooyay 3y agoWhat is an "HN" type? HN has smart, dumb, and in-between people of every variety. That's the byproduct you get of encouraging curiosity. I don't think HN was even around in any sort of prominence when Perl died. I stopped using Perl because my egg drop bots got laborious along with my expect scripts. They were novel early on, but maintaining them became something of a chore I wasn't inclined to do anymore. Other things started to do that better. Personally, I think Python won because it's syntax was much more readable. It had nothing to do with technical merits. DX is a strong subliminal motivator.