v1.0 then:
“Perl is kind of designed to make #awk and #sed semi-obsolete […] The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/releases/tag/perl-1.0
@sjfloat@Perl When you get tired of escaping #shell metacharacters in your #awk and #sed pipelines, when you get tired of inventing new ways to pass structured data between small tools as text streams, #Perl is there.
Of course, you can take that last point too far. See #PowerShell or even #jq, where half the “fun” is marshalling between bespoke data structures.
@mjgardner@Perl My usual practice at the time, was to begin in bourne shell. If the complexity became unwieldy, I'd stick an "END" near the top and start moving things up, porting as I went.
@mjgardner@Perl I remember first encountering Perl as Perl3, just before Perl4 and the Camel book. I remember looking at the crazy sigils and deciding, "this is it, the first new language I don't bother to learn."
6 months later, I had learned.
30+ years later, the majority of my working life continues to be spent manipulating those sigils. @rrays and $calars and h%shes FTW!
@dragonsidedd@Perl “Sigils have many benefits, not least of which is that variables can be interpolated into strings with no additional syntax. #Perl scripts are also easy to read (for people who have bothered to learn Perl!) because the nouns stand out from verbs. And new verbs can be added to the language without breaking old scripts.”
—‘Programming Perl’ by brian d foy, Tom Christiansen, et al.
@mjgardner@Perl Yup, matches my experience.. I went from writing little C programs to do stuff, to writing awk scripts, and then trying this new (to me) language called Perl to write my scripts.
Hmm .. it's pretty good, like awk, but without the limitations. Oh, and there's a local user group that meets monthly? I should join.
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