Comment by ajross
2 days ago
> 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.