Comment by dijit
2 days ago
There's so much I can write here, not only do I agree with you - there remains little better for processing streams of text than perl.
Even PHPs prominence (and ease of use) can be traced back to the parts it borrows from Perl; since the web is just manipulating text after all.
I went on a similar journey to you. Started with C, moved to bash, then to perl to replace bash scripts, and you're right that it feels like a super power.
But the most interesting language I've ever coded in was probably Ruby, because it changed the way I look at languages. In Ruby, everything is an object and everything is mutable - this makes the dynamic metascripting possibilities simply absurd.
I don't advocate for these languages anymore, as Perl is easy to become "write once, read never", in a way that's much worse than bash- but I can't help but feel like we have definitely lost a killer language for text processing. Seemingly nobody writes perl anymore.
> there remains little better for processing streams of text than perl.
That's true, but obscures what IMHO is a deeper truth: thinking in perl naturally leads to thinking in "streams of text", which is a kind of general composability that's been largely forgotten in the Unix world.
These days every project has it's own giant list of dependencies, it's own conventions about code structure, it's own list of para-toolchain utilities like linters and formatters. Often it even has it's own set of vscode extensions you pretty much have to use.
Nothing is just a tool anymore.
So much this. While software is generally more reliable now, it certainly isn’t composable, and the ability to script solutions on the fly has been lost.
So often, people want their systems to be scriptable… they were once, and then people destroyed the things that made all that possible.
I do :)