I just saw someone rant about "people writing shell scripts" and, no hard feelings, but I have yet to find a mainstream programming language that allows me to build streaming data pipelines as efficiently and effortlessly as a shell script.
Sure it's not typesafe and can be hard to read and it's easy to build a clever solution that you yourself won't be able to understand anymore in three months…
…and that's when it dawned on me that this is how Perl programmers must have felt 15 years ago.
@scy Perl got a bad name circa 1993-2000 because lots of idiots who shouldn't have been allowed near a programming language at all decided to randomly mix'n'match every feature it offered, for maximum obscurity, without comments or sanity. PROPERLY written perl is modular, documented, has test suites, and is a joy to work with. (Even the regular expressions can have comments and whitespace to make them legible!)
@scy heh. We still maintain a bit of highly lucrative perl stack and those coders def still feel that way. They all write Java, python and other stuff too, and we replace the perl once chunk at a time, but in their hearts it's obvious they still love spelunking the perl caverns for the scroll with the inscrutable but incredibly powerful incantation that does the thing nothing else can quite do in that exact way. It's charming.
@scy I used to write perl (then shifted to php for work reasons) and there's still times a shell script, piping a few commands together would be sinmpler than pulling out a full programming language
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