Python was designed (was Re: Multi-threading in Python vs Java)
Roy Smith
roy at panix.com
Sun Oct 13 09:04:56 EDT 2013
In article <525a15ad$0$29984$c3e8da3$5496439d at news.astraweb.com>,
Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> While I agree with your general thrust, I don't think it's quite so
> simple. Perl has a king, Larry Wall, but his design is more or less
> "throw everything into the pot, it'll be fine" and consequently Perl is,
> well, *weird*, with some pretty poor^W strange design decisions.
To be fair to Larry, there were different design drivers working there.
Pre-perl, people built humungous shell scripts, duct-taping together
little bits of sed, grep, awk, and other command-line tools. What perl
did, was make it easier to use the functionality of those disparate
tools together in a single language. By holding on to the little bits
of syntax from the precursor languages, he kept the result familiar
feeling, so Unix sysadmins (who were the main audience for perl) were
willing to adopt it.
It was wildly successful, not because it was perfect, but because it
beat the pants off what came before it.
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