STORY
Usenet and the No Perl Please Challenge
Usenet and the No Perl Please Challenge
- Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent hours every day on Usenet in technical newsgroups like
comp.unix.shellandcomp.unix.questions. The 40-Line Pipelines
- Whenever someone posted a convoluted data transformation problem requiring a brittle, 40-line pipeline of
sed | awk | tr | cut | sort | uniq | ed, I would answer by dropping a clean, 2-line Perl script that solved the problem reliably without choking on whitespace or special characters.
- Whenever someone posted a convoluted data transformation problem requiring a brittle, 40-line pipeline of
"HOW DO I DO THIS? (NO PERL PLEASE!)"
- Eventually, I answered so many questions with Perl that one exasperated user submitted a post with an all-caps subject line:
- "HOW DO I DO THIS? (NO PERL PLEASE!)"
- I smiled and replied with the ultimate two-part response: 1. First, I gave him exactly what he asked for: a brittle, tortuous, 25-line Bourne shell and awk pipeline that faithfully solved his problem under standard Unix constraints. 2. And then, right at the bottom, I added: "And by the way, here is the 2-line Perl script that does it in 1/10th the time and won't break on spaces in filenames."
- Eventually, I answered so many questions with Perl that one exasperated user submitted a post with an all-caps subject line:
Converting a Generation
- I evangelized Perl not through abstract marketing hype, but by proving it solved real-world problems far better than the alternatives. Showing the stark contrast side-by-side converted an entire generation of Unix systems administrators.
What links here
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.