Very OT, not Classic at all: Comments on Perl (was Re: Ancient , machines turning on)

From: Aaron Christopher Finney <aaron_at_wfi-inc.com>
Date: Sun Nov 1 09:56:31 1998

On Sun, 1 Nov 1998, Ward Donald Griffiths III wrote:

> Oh, Perl is a good language, I have enormous respect for Larry Wall.
> Remember that there has never been a language written in which it is
> impossible to write bad programs. Admittedly I don't use it as much
> as I should (it's too new), as a sysadmin type my main language is
> still the Bourne shell and its descendants after all these years.
> And even when I write scripts for ksh and bash, I try to stick to
> the subset compatible with the original, since that way they'll run
> on my Tandy 6000 and AT&T 7300s. (Oh, I do document even my simplest
> scripts, since there are several that have been evolving for a decade
> and a half, since my days as a Tandy tech support guy).

I'm in the same situation as Cappy, a programmer playing a sysadmin on TV.
But for me, our NT machines (after the 10th format) are stable (our fax
server has been running well for ~3 months without a reboot, even with
SP3!) and the Linux and FreeBSD boxen are even more so.

Perl has been a godsend for me, since it allows me to write fairly
intricate system-related programs with good portablilty between the Unix
and NT machines. In fact, I have one larger program (~ 7,500 lines) which
performs some automated ftp uploading of client's files that has been
running without a hitch for more than 6 months! I think I've made less
than a dozen mods during that time, while the system was still on-line,
and just killed and restarted without missing a beat. I used to do any
CGI-web stuff in C. Halfway through a project to allow clients to have
access to status information in a MSSQL database on an NT server (web
server is Linux/Apache) I tried Perl; I finished 3 weeks *ahead* of
schedule! When was the last time that happened??? And using the Sypberl
module, I was able to connect to the MSSQL server on the first try. Damn!
And you want to rag on Perl?

> > And I challenge you to find any "non-worst" aspects of awk. After
> almost 16 years, I still can't use it without having the man page
> immediately at hand.

Amen...



Aaron C. Finney Systems Administrator WFI Incorporated
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"UNIX is an exponential algorithm with a seductively small constant."
                --> Scott Draves
Received on Sun Nov 01 1998 - 09:56:31 GMT