zlacker

I think if you were a sysadmin and used to shell scripts, sed, awk, grep and xargs then perl probably made more sense than if you were a programmer from a more traditional language coming into the perl world.

>>SoftTa+(OP)
If I am familiar with sed, awk, grep and xargs, was I a sysadmin ?

>>SoftTa+(OP)
>I think if you were a sysadmin and used to shell scripts, sed, awk, grep and xargs then perl probably made more sense than if you were a programmer from a more traditional language coming into the perl world.

This, it was very unixy and felt like a natural progression from shell scripting. I think that's why a lot of early linux adopters were so enamored.

>>aorlof+65
If you are familiar with all of these but not C or Java or some other "traditional" programming language, then yes, I think anyone would guess you were a sysadmin. This was the type of background GP was talking about - people familiar with shell scripting but not any other programming language, who come by Perl for the first time.

>>SoftTa+(OP)
That makes a lot of sense. After 30+ years of programming, I still have to do a search (or use an LLM) to do anything useful with sed, xargs, etc. Perl never really clicked with me either.

On the other hand, I was able to easily pick up just about any "tradional" language I tried--from Basic and C in the 80s all the way to Dart and Go more recently.

>>SoftTa+(OP)
As somone that switches between both roles, when doing DevOps (aka sysadmin in 21st century) even though there is more stress regarding dealing with infrastructure, there is a certain peace of mind being away from Scrum, Jira, milestones, and other stuff, versus plain shell scripts, sed, awk, grep and xargs, VMs up and down.

Or doing a plain set of scripts into a repo, instead of endless arguments how fit a module implemenents the onion and hexagonal architectures, clean code, or whatever is the trend in this year's architecture conferences.