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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

#101

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#102

Post by shrubble »

SoftTalker wrote: post #27
jph00 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I once went looking for something like Ansible that was implemented in Perl. Does such a thing exist? I think declarative system orchestration got popular well after perl's popularity declined. In any case, I did not find anything.

There is CFengine which can have modules for it written in Perl, but itself is not written in Perl.

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

#104

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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, but more importantly, the unmaintainable nightmare that glued all of it together was wiped out.

Er, Perl replaced an unmaintainable nightmare? Perl, the language infamous for being indistinguishable from line noise?

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

#105

Post by kristopolous »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #93
kristopolous wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1980s awk and sed aren't the same as the 2020s version. They've become much more useful because of the influence of things like perl. To see what I mean, here's SunOS 4.1.1's man page for awk and sed as grabbed from https://github.com/ambiamber/Run-Sun3-SunOS-4.1.1/blob/main/... and ran through groffer(1) . These are from 1989 and 1987 respectively. The core stuff is there but not much else. https://9ol.es/sed.1v.pdf…

Awk today is very much the same language it was in 1977 when it was introduced. Comparing your links with today's POSIX awk manpage doesn't yield a single thing Perl brought to awk. At best, while JavaScript syntax is even based on awk, you could say JavaScript regexpes are based on PCRE, and it wasn't clear whether use of capture groups/back references makes Perl regexpes accidentally Turing.

POSIX, right. POSIX sucks. POSIX anything is stuck 30 years ago. Nobody in 2023 really uses POSIX awk on some commercial UNIX like IBM AIX, they use GNU awk, that's the modern one I'm talking about https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/index.htm...

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

#106

Post by margalabargala »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #104
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, but more importantly, the unmaintainable nightmare that glued all of it together was wiped out. Er, Perl replaced an unmaintainable nightmare? Perl, the language infamous for being indistinguishable from line noise?

Yes. It's comparative. The absolute value of Perl's readability, maintainability, and general intuitiveness is massively better than all comparable tools that existed when Perl came out. Perl is a massive improvement over those tools.

If you have doubts, try writing a complicated production software stack in awk. Then hand it off to a coworker.

One need not be irreplaceably good, if one is already beating the current state of the art by an order of magnitude. Perl did this.

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

#107

Post by BaseballPhysics »

margalabargala wrote: post #106
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, awk and sed were replaced by Perl, but more importantly, the unmaintainable nightmare that glued all of it together was wiped out. Er, Perl replaced an unmaintainable nightmare? Perl, the language infamous for being indistinguishable from line noise?

Yes. It's comparative. The absolute value of Perl's readability, maintainability, and general intuitiveness is massively better than all comparable tools that existed when Perl came out. Perl is a massive improvement over those tools. If you have doubts, try writing a complicated production software stack in awk. Then hand it off to a coworker. One need not be irreplaceably good, if one is already beating the current…

Moreover, as often as people joke about the readability of Perl code, that's entirely a function of the developer.

I've easily written tens of thousands of lines of Perl, and not a single person has complained about difficulty reading or maintaining that code. Why? Because I apply all the usual best practices for code hygiene that apply to any language.

Frankly, I think most people are just repeating a meme they heard once, and the rest just get put off by a) sigils, and b) the use of implicit variables (which I tend to use only very sparingly, and mostly in quick one-liners).

But a developer that poorly names their functions or variables, fails to modularize appropriately, fails to document their code, abuses language features because they want to be excessively terse or clever, that kind of person is gonna write crappy, difficult-to-maintain code no matter what language they use.

In fact, I'd argue the advent and popularity of Python--which was pretty radical in how opinionated it was at the time--is a direct response to languages like Perl and C that were a lot more free-form and easier to abuse by poor coders.

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

#108

Post by 878654Tom »

whateveracct wrote: post #91
jph00 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's a good resource to be proficient in perl for shell scripting? I write a lot of bash for better or worse. I wonder if perl would be a better choice sometimes.

If you can't manage it with Shell scripting you should take a look at Python.

I've written Perl for many years but in the end switched to Python because the internet and resources you can find are much more quantitative and qualitative than those for Perl. Especially now when Google doesn't seem to return older results anymore.

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

#109

Post by j16sdiz »

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…

> 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.

This works really well if your problem can be solved in one or two liners.

It go bad very quickly when, say, you have two CSV files and want to join them the sql-way. In sed, you have to use positional variables and think about shell escaping. In perl, you can at least name those variables and use \Q

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

#110

Post by mulmen »

ryukoposting wrote: post #43
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.

Well Perl isn’t (just) a web language. And this article does a pretty good job explaining what it is. Which is a powerful, lightweight general purpose programming language.

CPAN alone is worth the price of admission. I started my career using Perl to build Excel spreadsheets from queries I ran against Oracle DB. That may sound horrible but it was actually plug and play. Really simple and just worked. I could even fire off emails from the script. Just zero hurdles (or guard rails).

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