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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

#41

Post by natch »

imron wrote: post #17
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.

…that you’re aware of.

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

#42

Post by imiric »

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…

> 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.

This doesn't sound that horrific to me. It's the classic Unix approach of building small tools that do one thing well, and composing them in novel ways to solve problems. For any problem that can't be solved this way you write another small tool using your programming language of choice. Rinse and repeat.

But occasionally Unix attracts users and programmers who reject this approach, and who prefer building a monolithic tool, or in the case of Larry Wall, new programming languages. To be clear, I'm a fan of Perl and think it has its place, especially in the era it came out. It inspired many modern languages, and its impact is undeniable.

Personally, I find solutions you refer to as "unmaintainable nightmare" to be simple and elegant, if used correctly. No, you probably shouldn't abuse shell scripts to build a complex system, and beyond a certain level of complexity, a programming language is the better tool. But for most simple processing pipelines, Unix tools are perfectly capable and can be used to build maintainable solutions.

The classic Knuth-Mcllroy bout[1] comes to mind. Would you rather maintain Knuth's solution or Mcllroy's?

[1]: https://matt-rickard.com/instinct-and-culture

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

#43

Post by ryukoposting »

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.

I'm younger than a lot of folks on HN, but I've never touched Perl for anything more than some copy-pasted shell one-liners from stack overflow. Granted, web isn't what I get paid to do, but I still know Ruby, Python, a bit of SQL, etc... I've just never really had a use case for Perl, nor am I totally sure what that use case would look like.

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

#44

Post by adastra22 »

_2z1p wrote: post #36
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…

Not just the language itself but the whole ecosystem it brought with it was revolutionary. CPAN was incredible. There seemed like there was a module for just about anything! Perldoc and a testing framework were built right in. Regexes, backticks to shell out to the system, reporting built in. It really was the whole package.

Yeah CPAN is easy to take for granted now that every language has its own package manager (npm, cargo, pip), and even for C/C++ you can find what you want on GitHub. At the time though CPAN was revolutionary and no one else had it. To be able to just search for a module, find one that did what you wanted, then download it to your project was pure magic.

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

#46

Post by idlewords »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #39

I know people dump on Perl all the time, I know I do. But it was a critical part of computing history. Perl did a tremendous job of bridging the gap between shell commands and shell scripts and “big languages”. Way back in the early 90’s I took a complicated shell script that took about 2 hours to run this huge text processing job , rewrote it in Perl and it took about 20 seconds, and was more maintainable to boot. I…

During a later period (early 2000's) Perl was the only scripting language with good Unicode support, including inside regular expressions, which was revolutionary at the time. There was so much cool stuff you could only do in Perl, and then like you say it all ran into the brick wall of Perl 6.

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

#47

Post by Cyberdog »

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.

I don't think comparing Perl to SQL quite works. There are currently plenty of other widely-used scripting languages that can do the same sort of thing that Perl does (if we consider it in the context of a general purpose scripting language rather than a sed/awk alternative), but the usage of SQL alternatives for querying relational databases is a rounding error.

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

#48

Post by drewg123 »

"Congratulations. You aren't running Eunice."

I still remember seeing this line from the configure script scroll by.. Made me curious what Eunice was, which was harder than it might seem, given that this was before the web and any search engines.. (and yes, it turns out Eunice was a unix-ish environment on VAX/VMS)

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

#49

Post by Scubabear68 »

imiric wrote: post #42
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…

> 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. This doesn't sound that horrific to me. It's the classic Unix approach of building small tools that do one thing well, and composing them in novel ways to solve problems. For any problem that can't be solved this way you wri…

I don’t think you’ve seen the kind of scripts the person you are responding to is talking about.

I have, and mentioned one lower down in the comments. Unix philosophy was great but does not scale well in terms of maintainability or efficiency. Invoking processes over and over again loops is godawful slow. And the horror of complicated shell scripts is legendary.

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

#50

Post by stubish »

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…

Back in the 90s I got my first 'real' job, and needed to learn well grep, awk, sed, col et. al. Or learn Perl. Perl kept us afloat until we had too much Perl and needed to switch to Python. And I still don't know awk or sed; to this day my fingers just go with 'perl -pie'.
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