One minor quibble with his myths, the *nix shell languages are not
arcane, no more arcane, at any rate, than C itself. The odd syntax
for
conditionals has a reason. Every programming language has it's
reasons, and failure to understand them makes them appear odd. But
odd
is not arcane.
Now, perl can be arcane, but Lennart didn't address perl at all. He
didn't really address sh either, come to think of it, just waved his
hands at it.
Program source can be arcane in any language, and this is one point
he
totally misses. It's kind of representative of the way he keeps
failing to see the forest for the trees --
Initialization files have syntax. They may not form turing complete
languages, but they do form a language. (Yes, we call XML a
language.)
Any language can be used in arcane ways. The quickest way to make a
language arcane is to try to force it to into contexts the language
design ignored.