"Paul Boddie" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Perl had the "cool tool" buzz a good ten years ago.
That's true, but I think it understates just how important a development Perl really was. Before Perl, unix scripting consisted of awk, sed, grep, tr, a random assortment of incompatible shells, and lots of duct tape. For all of its faults, there is no doubt that Perl was a huge improvement over that mess. Much of the uglyness in Perl's syntax was a deliberate attempt to be backwards compatable with both awk and shell, which contributed to its quick uptake by the Unix sysadmin community. The next thing that drove its popularity is that it was quickly ported to run on DOS/Windows. If there was a community even more in need of a better toolkit than the early Unix sysadmins, the DOS/Windows world was it. Compared to what existed at the time, in both the Unix and DOS/Windows world, it was the best tool available at the time. No question about it. Perl also had (AFAICT) a three-year head start on Python. That's a lot of momentum to overcome. The fact that 15+ years of experience has shown that there are better ways to do things, should not in any way take away from Perl's importance. Perl got where it is because it filled a huge need, not just because it got good buzz. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
