85% languages (was Re:Linux fat/bloated)

[Paul Nash]

>It is unfortunate that these new languages like Perl came out .. that
>we can't all use one single good old language like Ruby.  But that'll
>never happen.  All that choice nonsense people keep going on about.
>Everyone wants to do their own half-assed thing so the world is full
>of 85% quality stuff.

Minor point, but Perl has been around for longer than I care to admit
knowing about.  Certainly much longer than relative newcomers like Ruby,
PHP, python or even TCL.

Different languages for different uses:

Larrry Wall wrote Perl for system administrators to rip logfiles to pieces.
As a professional sysadmin, Perl is still my #1 tool for generic system
automation (/bin/sh doesn't count).  It can do stuff to text that even
vi(1) has some difficulty with.

AWK was designed to handle tables of data, which it does well.  You can use
perl instead, but AWK is simpler/cleaner.

TCL was designed to be small and easy to embed in tools (hence "Tool
Control Language").  It's mostly linked to the Tk toolkit, but I've seen it
used in lots and lots of places.

... and so on.

There's a *nix tradition of building lots of small tools that do one thing,
and do it well.  I remember the flames when ls(1) had a 'sort' option
added, as this turned it into a tool that did two things and duplicated
what another tool did.

Perl is an exception, in that it is big and does lots of things, and that
you can do thing sin many different ways withing Perl (think swiss army
knife cum cordless drill cum chainsaw cum hammer cum ...).  It's just too
damn useful to do without.

As for the rest, they have their places (I suppose).  If you think that
something is half-arsed and only 85% there, either don't use it (and the
tools that depend on it) or roll up your sleeves and provide the missing
15%.

My own personal peeve is the number of projects that start at version 0.01,
and somehow stabilise at version 0.9.  If it works and is usable, call it
version 1, for god's sake!

	paul
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