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If you'd told me two years ago that I was going to drop Perl like a Miller
Light by now, I would have been right in thinking that you knew something that
I didn't at the time: that there was something better.
Perl Sucks. My scripting genealogy looks something like:
1) TRS-80 Basic
2) Applesoft Basic
3) VAX/VMS DCL
4) Microsoft DOS Batch
5) csh/ksh/zsh/bash (It was all a blur.)
6) Perl
7) Python
8) Ruby
Note that the backward steps were from 3 to 4, though 5 didn't beat 3, either,
and from 6 to 7. Sorry guys, there's a lot of cool stuff it Python, but that
doesn't make up for the fact that they blew it from day 1.
Anyway, the point is that Perl was the first thing that anyone introduced me to
(or, in Perl's case, that I introduced myself to) that did text processing
worth a damn. Perl will get the job done, but everything about it is painful
and unpleasant.
Goodbye, $|. Farewell, shift-4. Bite me, curlies and semicolons.
I've been rewriting scripts that I hacked out in Perl years ago - at a line
count reduction rate of something approaching 80-90 percent.
--rbarry
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