promoting Perl (was Re: uutraffic report (in perl))

[Randal Schwartz]

In article <3273 at convex.UUCP>, tchrist at convex (Tom Christiansen) writes:
| Please don't take this wrong, but why DON'T you have perl? 

[...]

| Larry Wall, is the same man who brought you rn, metaconfig, and patch.

And don't forget warp! :-)

| He privately supports perl better than any industrial software house
| that I've ever seen. 

Hear hear!

| Perl is light years ahead of awk, sed, and sh as far as tools go.  I
| very strongly believe that it will be around for many years to come,
| and that it will be extremely widely used throughout the world. 

I hope so too, although I'm a bit biased, since I will be making
(minimal :-) royalties off the forthcoming book on Perl from Nutshell
Handbooks (written by "Larry Wall, as told to Randal L. Schwartz" :-).

|								   You
| can see how much source has come across the net just lately that's been
| written in perl.

Hmm... anything to do with me answering every request in
comp.unix.questions with a Perl one-liner? :-)

|		    I have not written any awk or sed scripts since I got
| perl, and certainly none of those horrendous sh scripts full of
| multiple calls to sed and awk and tr and sort and cut and paste and
| expand and grep and all their brethren.  I've saved myself quite a
| bit of development time by writing fewer C programs as well.

Exactly!

| Furthermore, perl programs are portable without modification or
| recompilation to a wealth of architectures.  I only have around 5
| architectures now to send common programs too, but in my last job there
| were no fewer than a dozen.  It's really nice to just close your eyes
| and rdist your program and know it will run.

As a sysadmin (in one of my *many* incarnations) working with four
very different architectures, I fully agree.  Many of the tasks that I
am doing easily now would have been horrible otherwise.

| Do yourself a favor: get perl.

And buy the book! :-)

Just another Perl hacker, with a flair for grandstanding,
-- 
/== Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ====\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Hillsboro, Oregon, USA, Sol III  |
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