Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed
1–10 of 261 posts
Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed
#2The funny thing is Perl is now arguably more obsolete than sed and awk.
Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed
#3Didn't git come out in 2005? Which version control was this using in 1987 that was converted into git compatibility?
Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed
#4I used to kind of unfairly disparage perl, but now I regret never learning it. I've written a lot of scripts for munging text/files that outgrow bash, and when I rewrite in Python they get twice as long. Seems like perl would be a happy medium and let me keep using a lot of the nice bash shortcuts like `baskticks` for shell execution, etc
Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed
#5One thing to keep in mind is that this is not actually the first version of perl, it's the first public version of perl. A version 0 did exist at the JPL previously but it's likely lost to the ages at this point.
EDIT: For the curious about the history, take a look at the perlhist documentation, https://perldoc.perl.org/perlhist it's got a lot of good info about the history of perl and it's releases.
Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed
#6Didn't git come out in 2005? Which version control was this using in 1987 that was converted into git compatibility?
I think someone synthesised a git history together from past versions, patches on usenet, etc
Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed
#7Didn't git come out in 2005? Which version control was this using in 1987 that was converted into git compatibility?
Sending patches on mailing lists? Also TIL that patch (the UNIX program) was also created by Larry Wall.
Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed
#8The funny thing is Perl is now arguably more obsolete than sed and awk.
That might be true culturally, but it's not true technically. Once you know a bit of Perl (including some command line switches like -e, -n, -a, -l, -p, and -i) you will be able to do just as easily everything you used to do in awk and sed, but with a more powerful foundation so you have the flexibility to go further.
Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed
#9I used to kind of unfairly disparage perl, but now I regret never learning it. I've written a lot of scripts for munging text/files that outgrow bash, and when I rewrite in Python they get twice as long. Seems like perl would be a happy medium and let me keep using a lot of the nice bash shortcuts like `baskticks` for shell execution, etc
Yeah so many people shooting themselves in the foot by failing to take advantage of this powerful tool - as you say especially for stuff that you might have otherwise used an overly-complex bash script for.
Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed
#10The funny thing is Perl is now arguably more obsolete than sed and awk.
My first thought when I saw this was that I'd like to see some stats on use of the three. I personally use sed and awk regularly and never perl, but I have no idea what is typical. I have a feeling that most people (amongst those who may have a use case) don't use any of them.