Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uunet!convex!usenet From: Tom Christiansen Subject: Re: ap Message-ID: <1991Jun05.013632.3198@convex.com> Followup-To: alt.religion.computers Sender: usenet@convex.com (news access account) Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX References: <16852@helios.TAMU.EDU> <1991Jun04.182921.1685@convex.com> <16867@helios.TAMU.EDU> Date: Wed, 05 Jun 1991 01:36:32 GMT Lines: 93 From the keyboard of byron@donald.tamu.edu (Byron Rakitzis), quoting me: :>I've never met a *good* C programmer who's had any real problems with [perl]. : :What is a *good* programmer? One who has no trouble learning perl? This is :a very circular definition. Otherwise, I don't think you're in any position :to judge my ability as a programmer. This is just ad-hominem. It wasn't meant to be. It was based on my experiences. The people who ask the most pointed questions while learning perl have been those who have a deep knowledge of C, and probably other languages as well. Once your brain evolves a language-lawyer mentality, you tend to apply this way of thinking to all you come in contact with. Good C programmers have always picked it up quickly. Budding programmers can have more trouble, but at least they just get null strings, not core dumps. :>There may be a momentary bit of discomfort at seeing dollar signs and :>thinking of BASIC, but this quickly passes. Certainly no *good* programmer :>finds it hard. : :Ok, I haven't seen any *good* programmer have any trouble with JCL either. :After the inital discomfort of having to type all those //, the feeling :soon passes. (!!) I don't happen to find any parallelism between those two cases. :>You mean like these: : [deleted] :Yes, I mean like those. I think my hypothetical example was more concise :than any of the suggested replies above. Not every problem requires the same tool as its answer: that's why we have such a wide variety of them. I still use sed and awk from the command line. :I think you miss the point. An expressive language does not imply a perl- :like language. A language with the powerful features of perl that's been :designed carefully without trying to incorporate syntactic features of :every programming language known can be just as expressive. : :I don't want my language to have a BASIC way of doing things, an APL way :of doing things, a C way of doing things... To borrow a quote from a colleague, programs in large languages come out small, those in small ones come out long. I happen to prefer my languages big because I want my programs small; less writing time. I've been shocked by a lot ruder things in this life than mere dollar signs in front of variable names or having more than one way to express a for loop. :Do you know what part of C Dennis Ritchie is most unhappy with? The declaration :syntax! Yes! It's stupid and ugly and hard to understand. That's why I chose it. To point out there exist awkwardnesses that the authors wish they'd have done differently had they the chance to redo it. That doesn't stop their creations from filling vacuums and achieving widespread use. It just gives us something to complain about. :-) :I don't see what your problem is. Clearly perl was not written in a single :vision. If *anything* is an agglomeration of random features, it has *got* :to be perl. While we users have contributed somewhat to perl's development, such as our crying out for the <=> operator, by and large the whole thing is the brainchild of one man. Certainly he drew from many sources, but that's not the same as having a committee sit down to define a new language: along that path lies madness and ADA. I don't really see what this thread is doing in comp.unix.shell, when to my ears it sounds a lot more like a candidate for alt.religion.computers instead. I've directed followups there, which is where people like to argue about things like this. I think you'll find that if you set about trying to improve awk, what you'll come up with will be a lot more perlian than you're expecting. Read Henry Spencer's paper on awk as a systems programming language. 99% of his laments about awk's shortcomings were things that Larry had already handled in perl before he'd even spoken with Henry about it. Common problems often spawn remarkably similar solutions through convergent evolution. You're obviously a small-is-beautiful person, one valuing aesthetics over utility. Fine. If you don't like it, don't use it. But a lot of us find it the neatest thing since sliced bread, and we get a lot of milage out of this funny-looking camel. It's not some prancing show horse with oh so beautiful lines triggering oohs and ahs from the audience. But I know which beastie *I'd* rather have in the desert: the one that gets the job done quickest without breaking down due to lack of horsepower, or in this case, camelpower. --tom -- Tom Christiansen tchrist@convex.com convex!tchrist "Perl is to sed as C is to assembly language." -me