> > Perl is unbelievably commonplace, though. You don't have it/use it?
>
> No. I don't really like it all that much as a language in its own
> right, and I strongly dislike some aspects of the culture that has
> grown up around it.
Fair enough, but conversely, I'm not a fan of Python and I went to the
trouble of building it and maintaining it on my systems here because there
were some useful tools that needed it. I don't appreciate Python a whole
lot more despite my common interactions with it (even though I've learned
enough Python to hack things into submission when required), but whatever
tools are needed for the job ...
I do note that I've been irritated with the Perl community's transition to
more object oriented libraries. Part of the reason I like Perl is that
it lets you throw stuff together, and it works (hearing a chorus of high
falutin' sniffs from the self-proclaimed computer scientists in the audience,
to which I offer you an mildly disparaging command expression of two
syllables). I would be greatly distressed if its kindness to quick hacks
were to evapourate in the quest for better structured programming, which in
Perl's case, is putting a dress on a donkey and not its strong suit. I *like*
it because it's randy and uncouth as a programming language, not because it's
got any pretensions of organization. :)
Sorry, OT off.
> > I barely remember life before Perl (and for that matter tcsh -- I
> > can't believe I fumbled by on csh all those years in university).
>
> I had trouble dealing with no command-line editing, so I patched DCL to
> add it (and in the process discovered a bug, er, ahem, "undocumented
> limitation" in patch). When we switched from VMS to Unix, I _really_
> missed ECL (what I called my patched DCL), so I added command-line
> editing to csh. What the result has become by the present day is still
> my preferred shell; it differs from tcsh in a number of important-to-me
> ways. (One of my back-burner projects is building a new shell entirely
> de novo....)
The command line editing was what won me over to tcsh. On the vintage
systems I run across, the first order of business after busting in is
to get a tcsh install and compile it.
My funny tcsh story was a guy I knew who had inherited the HP/UX sysadmin
job from a friend of mine who moved to the Bay Area. I introduced him to
tcsh and he loved it. Unfortunately, being a relative Unix novice (he
primarily administered NT systems), he went ahead and set the root default
shell to tcsh. So, the next time the machine went into a scheduled reboot,
it wouldn't start and he frantically showed up at the office I was using as
an outside contractor (this particular HP9000 was the campus administrative
server, and downtime was certain death). I didn't know what he'd done to
the shell, btw. When I went down to the server room, I couldn't find anything
wrong with the disks or system; it just wouldn't finish the startup sequence.
HP tech scratched their heads for an hour until some guy in the back of their
tech office asked if anything about root had been changed ... and then we
figured it out. tcsh had been compiled dynamically linked, and the disk with
the shared libraries hadn't been mounted yet. Oops. After resolution and
multiuser boot, tcsh was hastily recompiled static. ^_^
--
---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser_at_floodgap.com
-- Eeny, Meeny, Jelly Beanie, the spirits are about to speak! -- Bullwinkle ---
Received on Fri May 28 2004 - 13:59:10 BST