Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jpl-devvax!lwall
From: lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: What does an anti-perl look like
Message-ID: <1991Jun18.004338.23499@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov>
Date: 18 Jun 91 00:43:38 GMT
References: <16867@helios.TAMU.EDU> <1991Jun05.013632.3198@convex.com> <1991Jun05.220157.13416@convex.com> <541@smds.UUCP> <552@smds.UUCP> <2154@sheol.UUCP>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 39

In article <2154@sheol.UUCP> throopw@sheol.UUCP (Wayne Throop) writes:
: > rh@smds.UUCP (Richard Harter)
: > The power of UNIX shell programming
: > rests not in the shell language itself, but in the collection of tool
: > programs that are standardly available, e.g. sed, awk, find, uniq, sort,
: > and their interconnection with pipes and redirection.  [..but..]
: > the execution of the resulting scripts is slow because each tool is
: > a separate process, [...]
: 
: A thought that occurs to me is that the rapid adoption of perl in the
: Unix community is a back-door defection to a philosophy that Lisp folks
: have been preaching for years.  In perl, one is partly abandoning the
: the notion of small, stand-alone tools that do one thing well, and
: instead adopting the monolithic everything-in-one-language approach that
: Lisp has always had.  You know.  "Swiss army chainsaw."  Perl simply
: makes this palatable to the Unix community by leaving out some of the
: parenthesis and including a baroque syntax and idiosyncratic semantics.  :-)

That's not too far off the mark.  The baroque syntax and idiosyncratic
semantics are necessary in Perl precisely because they're borrowed from
Unix culture.  As such, ugliness is part of its design goal.  However,
the monolithicism isn't intended to take anything away from the toolbox
approach, but merely to give you an alternative.  Perl isn't a toolbox,
but a small machine shop where you can special-order certain sorts of
tools at low cost and in short order.

As someone else remarked, it's the height of arrogance to design a
language.  With normal human languages, nobody can even hope to design
more than a few catchy phrases.  Thus, such languages are totally
undesigned.  They are, nevertheless, useful upon occasion.  I have just
enough hubris to think that I can design a medium-sized language that
has some of the positive aspects of a "large" language without a lot of
its negative aspects.  If this is what you're reacting to when you say
"I want anti-perl," then your anti-perl is going to be solving a
different problem than Perl does.  More power to you, but I'll keep
doing my thing...

Larry Wall
lwall@netlabs.com