[geeks] Go Apple....

[jodys at helluin.org]

On Mon, Jul 29, 2002 at 06:00:30PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> [ On Monday, July 29, 2002 at 10:03:28 (-0500), Bill Bradford wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: [geeks] Go Apple....
> >
> > Its not the greatest thing, but its fine for "quick and dirty" stuff.
> 
> No, awk and sed are fine for "quick" stuff.....  :-)
> 
> Perl has never even had a valid reason for existing, never mind being used.
> 
That is just harsh, perl has always been a win in some
cases, or no one would use it. It's not like their
is a insidious perl conspiracy that brainwashes new 
unix users into only using perl. Just because you 
don't like it, doesn't invalidate it. We are talking
about unix right, programmer freedom and all. awk 
and sed don't like me, and I don't like them, I 
use something else instead, everyone wins.

And no sed and awk are not fine for quick stuff. There
are a lot of cases when you need to talk of the network,
talk to a database, talk to the moon or whatever that
are not evenly supported sed or awk (if you think of 
shell, awk, sed, standard unix utilities as being a
comparable environment). Yes there are command line
utilities to gain this functionality but every one
has subtleties and complexities in its interface,
nor are you guarnteed the exsistence of these utilities
on a new platform. No standards for things that 
should be available (for instance, standard filters
that can open sockets). And in fact perl is excellent
for making just such filters, I've done it a lot.
When time is of the essence, programming that absolute
least is the best. 

And it sure is nice to have only one version of 
a language. Sed and awk both have different 
implmentations, some with major feature upgrades, 
some with subtle little tiny bugs to catch the unwary.

<opinion>
Awk, sed, and sh script combos are just as ugly 
as a perl program. Then again I find very little
in how how unix is actually used that is elegant
or pretty.  
</opinion>

Finally anyone who writes more than 300 lines in
one perl program, needs to drop the keyboard,
come out with his hands up, and taken to the
proper authorities. :)

Jody