Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!sun-barr!oliveb!mipos3!omepd!merlyn From: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz) Newsgroups: comp.sources.bugs Subject: A heavy perl user speaks (was Re: Is there a good Perl book out?) Message-ID: <4884@omepd.UUCP> Date: 1 Sep 89 15:23:37 GMT References: <13900@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <5921@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> <1318@ethz-inf.UUCP> Sender: news@omepd.UUCP Reply-To: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz) Organization: Stonehenge; netaccess via Intel, Hillsboro, Oregon, USA Lines: 39 In-reply-to: wyle@inf.ethz.ch (Mitchell Wyle) In article <1318@ethz-inf.UUCP>, wyle@inf (Mitchell Wyle) writes: | I am still using awk because the book _The_AWK_Programming_Language_ is | so good. The examples in the book are useful and motivating. | | Perl is better than awk. The man page is slightly better than awk's. | There is no book as good as A,W, and K's, however :-( | | Are there enough of us who would buy the book to make it worth NASA's | while to pay Larry to write it? | | Is there any political support (politics a la X-windows) to get someone | else to write it? | | Is there a Perl-users mailing list? As a heavy Perl user, and alpha tester for version 3 (a few of the features in soon-to-be-released version were at my request), I dunno about buying the book, but I'd contribute to *writing* it. (After all, I've spent roughly half of the past 15 years putting black dots on white paper for various computer companies, and the other half shuffling ones and zeroes around...) I think Perl should replace almost *any* use of sed or awk (maybe even grep :-), because it does things so nicely. It was also written in the traditional UNIX philosphy... build a toolset that is powerful and robust and predictable enough so that you can do almost any task "cleanly". So, whadda ya say, Larry? How about a joint effort for a book on "everything you've wanted to compute in Perl but were afraid to ask LWALL..."? (And, when are you going to rewrite the Configure script for Perl in Perl? :-) Just another satisfied customer, -- /== Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ====\ | on contract to Intel, Hillsboro, Oregon, USA | | merlyn@iwarp.intel.com ...!uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn | \== Cute Quote: "Welcome to Oregon... Home of the California Raisins!" ==/