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Perl is a shining example of OP's complaint - it is the kitchen sink. Sure, it allows you to do a ton of things, most all of which duplicate standard UNIX™ com

by bandy 14y ago

Perl is a shining example of OP's complaint - it is the kitchen sink. Sure, it allows you to do a ton of things, most all of which duplicate standard UNIX™ commands (those you'd find in PWB or v7), wrapped in a syntax that makes APL programmers recoil in horror. The argument the OP is making is that Unix has fallen into doing things The DEC Way, with gigantic monolithic programs that not only perform their obvious function, but have been turned into one of those twenty-pound Swiss Army Knives that look pretty but no-one actually uses, because they're too heavy to lug around. Does ls really need to emphasize its output with color? Better yet, in a default scheme that's often near-unreadable in an xterm that's running with its default colors? (I thank CentOS4/RHEL4 for this stunning example) No, it doesn't. Looking at ls output in a rainbow of colors is just as opaque to someone who hasn't read the man page (and grokked the system config file(!) for ls) as are the old single-character flags (with the exception of '/') that the F option gave back in '81 on BSD. Unix won over VMS, LISPMs, TOPS-20, CMS, etc., and all of those people have migrated to our platform, resulting in the world we have today.

kamaal 14y ago
Isn't that the crux of why worse is better. Turns out there is a huge mismatch between real world needs and text books demands of elegance. Tools that seem to be massively monolithic are extremely helpful in solving problems and do them far too well to do them away. Every time I hear why some programming language is better than Perl, I always see some Utopian dreams being displayed as the only thing that every matters to a programmer and nothing else. In reality there are many competing demands a programmer has. And providing them all generally leads to 'Swiss Army Knife' kind of designs. Because you are trying to provide many things in a package(That is the demand and the requirement at the first place). That sort of design might not be text book elegant, but it is extremely helpful in the real world. There fore the 'beauty' and 'utility' design goals don't often match. This is the unfortunate problem every programmer to face sooner or later. A programmer has to abide by time, budget and some metric of quality every time. Alas many of those demands don't lead to goals which may require an elegant design. In early days of Unix, Lisp programmers used to call the problems Perl programmers solve, itself as stupid. Telling the user why his needs are invalid isn't a nice way to sell things.
tedunangst 14y ago
It's weird to me when people call out perl as being un-unix. It's a programming language. Does that make C un-unix? I can also use C to duplicate anything a standard unix command does. Personally, I find sed so arcane, that if awk or perl weren't available, I'd probably actually use C to do anything more complicated than simple replacement.

by bandy 14y ago

kamaal 14y ago

Isn't that the crux of why worse is better. Turns out there is a huge mismatch between real world needs and text books demands of elegance. Tools that seem to be massively monolithic are extremely helpful in solving problems and do them far too well to do them away. Every time I hear why some programming language is better than Perl, I always see some Utopian dreams being displayed as the only thing that every matters to a programmer and nothing else. In reality there are many competing demands a programmer has. And providing them all generally leads to 'Swiss Army Knife' kind of designs. Because you are trying to provide many things in a package(That is the demand and the requirement at the first place). That sort of design might not be text book elegant, but it is extremely helpful in the real world. There fore the 'beauty' and 'utility' design goals don't often match. This is the unfortunate problem every programmer to face sooner or later. A programmer has to abide by time, budget and some metric of quality every time. Alas many of those demands don't lead to goals which may require an elegant design. In early days of Unix, Lisp programmers used to call the problems Perl programmers solve, itself as stupid. Telling the user why his needs are invalid isn't a nice way to sell things.

tedunangst 14y ago

It's weird to me when people call out perl as being un-unix. It's a programming language. Does that make C un-unix? I can also use C to duplicate anything a standard unix command does. Personally, I find sed so arcane, that if awk or perl weren't available, I'd probably actually use C to do anything more complicated than simple replacement.