Tim Watts wrote:
The Natural Philosopher
wibbled on Friday 07 May 2010 11:53

Tim Watts wrote:
Mike Clarke
wibbled on Friday 07 May 2010 09:58

Bob Eager wrote:

We always believed that sh was for scripting, and csh for interactive
work. Which is what I still do.
Same here except that I prefer perl for scripting.

Perl rules. Though I can see the merits of Python for the same basic
reasons. AFAIAC, shell (any traditional flavour) stinks for more than the
most trivial scripting. The fact is though that every system has a shell
of some short, but not every system has perl (embedded for example) so it
is ubiquitous.

But I don't see why that non embedded systems don't switch to using perl
- it would probably be more efficient as you wouldn't be spawning
hundreds of processes running cut and grep and so on during system
startup.

PERL is neither fish nor fowl nor fresh red herring. Just foul.

Its a tool for sysadmins with pretensions towards programing.

Real programmers use a compiler.

Don't be silly. Are you going to write sysadmin scripts in
C/C++/Java/Go/D/FORTRAN/whatever then compile them evertime you need to
tweak something?


see. Sysdamin scripts are not programs. Just crap hacks.

And yes, why not?

editing and typing 'make' is not actually very hard...

I've written a whole server applications set (several daemons) in perl.

Shudder. I've seen scripts like that. you need to buy a new CPU just to
run them.


The
CPU spent about 1% of its time running these despite them being in heavy
use processing lots of network data from dozens of clients. Most of the
load was in the RDBMS as I expected. Why would I torture myself with, say
C, when I can get regex, memory management and proper arrays and
associative arrays for free, and without the need to bother compiling?


Why indeed. Obviously you haven't seen the reasons.

Not to mention a comprehensive set of libraries (CPAN). Hell of a lot easier
to drop a quick print statement in here and there for debugging too.