On Mon, Apr 03, 2023 at 12:36:51PM -0400, Jeffrey Walton wrote: > On Sun, Apr 2, 2023 at 4:59 AM <coreyh@free.fr> wrote: > > > > I saw many commands in /bin and /usr/bin are written by perl. > > is perl still the first choice for sysadmin on linux? > > I am surprised this thread has not started a mini-flame war. Luckily those things are calming down a little bit (but beware. If you come across a younger language *cough* Rust *cough*, you still might be into some fun). > About the best you can say is, Perl is one of the more popular > scripting languages. Trying to pin down the "best" will fail because > it is opinion based. And depends on the task. And on the writer. And on the team. And more. > Next, you might ask which is the best editor to use on Unix & Linux. > That should really stir the pot :) Emacs for the win! Emacs +1 :-) Although I'm writing this with vim :-) :-) I always find those things very interesting: people fight for their tools as if there should be only one. By now (I'm pretty old, my first language was FORTRAN (yes, all capitals), then came Simula-67), I'm convinced that brains tend to be "wired" in different ways, so that people will feel tendencies towards different types of languages. Then, there are typical languages for big teams [1] (Java is one), which impose stricter structures. And those more for the creative folks, which make it so easy to "roll your own" that everyone ends up rolling (Lisps, I'm looking at you). My hunch for this horrible urge to have just One Language to Rule Them All is that it must be a very unhealty heritage of our monotheistic ways. As far as computer languages are concerned, I cherish this incredibly colourful and diverse world we have (I still have my likes and dislikes, mind you). Recommended reading (out of print, alas) "David Gelernter, Suresh Jagannathan: Programming Linguistics". Cheers [1] There's this wonderful quote by (again) Alan Perlis, out of the foreword to SICP [2]: "Pascal is for building pyramids -- imposing, breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms -- imposing, breathtaking, dynamic structures built by squads fitting fluctuating myriads of simpler organisms into place." What he writes about Pascal back then is the more true for Java. [2] https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/books_pres_0/6515/sicp.zip/full-text/book/book-Z-H-5.html#%_chap_Temp_2 -- t
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