[75] in Back_Bay_LISA
Re: To perl or not to perl?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew Kobayashi)
Thu Nov 19 14:13:59 1992
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 92 11:54:55 EST
From: ayk@Camex.COM (Andrew Kobayashi)
To: bblisa@inset.com
At my site i'm slowly converting all my existing tools to perl, and
writing any new ones that come up in perl. I've "done my time", having
written my share of "grep|sed|awk" things. I simply lost patience with
figuring out what gets quoted with what sort of quote mark, how many $$
and \\ in a row to use, and in general trying to figure out or guess
how many times, and under what syntax rules, each bit of the script
would get interpreted before it finally got executed.
I'm sure that the existing Unix tools are enough to do everything
i've ever needed to do, if i only had enough training and experience.
Unfortunately i don't have time to read six different news groups,
go to Usenix conventions, and in general sit at the feet of the
masters and apprentice, which is about the only way to learn a lot
of this stuff. Using perl i make design decisions. With the
existing stuff that is not enough; i then have to struggle with the
actual implementation. It is very frustrating to know what you want
done, and not be able to do it.
The telling point for me is that, using perl, *i can always figure
out a way to get the job done*. I have one fat book (the Nutshell
camel book) that contains all the information i need. I'm 100%
sure that i am not a perl guru. However, with the knowlege that i've
been able to acquire through the book i can do my work in a timely
fashion.
--Andrew Kobayashi
SysAdmin of Very Little Brain
DuPont/Camex Incorporated
75 Kneeland Street
Boston, MA 02111
Standard disclaimer applies.
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