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Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

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Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#11

Post by unpythonic »

When perl came out we were living in horrific times. You had the choice of either Bourne, C or Korn shell. Automation was glued together in one of these with a series of grep, awk, sed, ls, test, commands glued together. Anything more complicated was written in C and called from one of these things.

Perl in one stroke collapsed the programming of C, text manipulation, the capabilities of all of the Unix utilities, and data structures into one system. For anything which wasn't subsumed into the monolith of Perl, you could easy access via backticks. It was very friendly in dealing with text streams, and that's what those call-outs in those back ticks spoke.

Yes, awk and sed were replaced by Perl, but more importantly, the unmaintainable nightmare that glued all of it together was wiped out.

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#12

Post by SoftTalker »

unpythonic wrote: post #11

When perl came out we were living in horrific times. You had the choice of either Bourne, C or Korn shell. Automation was glued together in one of these with a series of grep, awk, sed, ls, test, commands glued together. Anything more complicated was written in C and called from one of these things. Perl in one stroke collapsed the programming of C, text manipulation, the capabilities of all of the Unix utilities, an…

sed and awk are still around and still used a lot especially for one-liners. Anything more than that is typically not done as much anymore, though is certainly possible.

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#14

Post by shrubble »

aportnoy wrote: post #2

The funny thing is Perl is now arguably more obsolete than sed and awk.

It's still used heavily for internal processes and internal web sites that query databases etc. At least at some of the large publicly traded companies I know about...

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#15

Post by SoftTalker »

version_five wrote: post #10
aportnoy wrote: post #2

The 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.

Yep I responded in another comment but I use sed and awk almost daily but I never learned Perl. It's actually something that could be useful in my current role though -- is there a particularly good intro to Perl in 2023 that I might want to look at?

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#16

Post by _2z1p »

Unpopular opinion, but I think we'd be so much better off if Netscape had just embedded a Perl interpreter instead of creating JavaScript. Perl CGI was already the dominant server side technology at the time and it has incredible string manipulation capabilities that would be beneficial for browser scripting.

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#17

Post by imron »

unpythonic wrote: post #11

When perl came out we were living in horrific times. You had the choice of either Bourne, C or Korn shell. Automation was glued together in one of these with a series of grep, awk, sed, ls, test, commands glued together. Anything more complicated was written in C and called from one of these things. Perl in one stroke collapsed the programming of C, text manipulation, the capabilities of all of the Unix utilities, an…

> Yes, awk and sed were replaced by Perl,

I still use awk and sed semi regularly. I haven’t used Perl in over a decade.

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#19

Post by SoftTalker »

mulmen wrote: post #13

I will always love perl because it got my career off the ground. Anyone who doesn’t just learn it is doing themselves a disservice. It’s similar to SQL in that sense.

Perl was huge in the early web and first dot-com boom, it was used a lot for CGI scripting.

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#20

Post by rozab »

simcop2387 wrote: post #5

One 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.

This doc has no info about perl version 0. Any source on it emerging at JPL? Can't find anything online except forum posts
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