As one of the few remaining people out there who considers perl to be their favorite language—starting to wonder if it’s just me and Larry Wall at this point—I’d like to say that perl should stay in base on its merits, all the perl-based system tools notwithstanding.
I decided learn perl because of OpenBSD back in the day. I was a primarily a java programmer (to be clear: not out of any affinity for Java) and had decided to use OpenBSD as my workstation OS. I quickly discovered that the Java development tools I used (netbeans, eclipse, etc.) weren’t all that robust in OpenBSD (old builds, crashy). So, I figured, OpenBSD users must not be java programmers and I set out figuring out what language they did use... by looking to see which languages were in base. Fast forward like 15 years and I’m now a perl/vim guy (a far cry from java/NetBeans!) and I couldn’t be happier. While I tolerated java, I actually really like perl. And the more I learn of it, the better i like it. I think a lot of people just haven’t really taken the time to learn perl’s subtleties and true perlish coding conventions. It’s really wonderful once you know it well. Ok— rant over. Carry on. Sent from my iPhone > On Dec 31, 2019, at 12:11 AM, Theo de Raadt <dera...@openbsd.org> wrote: > > Marc Espie <es...@nerim.net> wrote: > >> Removing perl from base would be very painful. >> >> I don't fancy rewriting all the perl tools in something else (specifically, >> most of the ports and package infrastructure) >> >> lua would definitely NOT be appropriate for that. The only half valid >> candidate would be python. >> >> Contrary to what some people might think, the tools in question won't be >> easier to understand and manage if written in another language. >> > > Contrary to what you think, the original proposal didn't come out of > a process called thinking. >
