1 Nov
1998
1 Nov
'98
1:56 a.m.
On Sun, 1 Nov 1998, Ward Donald Griffiths III wrote:
Amen...
Aaron C. Finney Systems Administrator WFI Incorporated
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"UNIX is an exponential algorithm with a seductively small constant."
--> Scott Draves
Oh, Perl is a good language, I have enormous respect
for Larry Wall.
Remember that there has never been a language written in which it is
impossible to write bad programs. Admittedly I don't use it as much
as I should (it's too new), as a sysadmin type my main language is
still the Bourne shell and its descendants after all these years.
And even when I write scripts for ksh and bash, I try to stick to
the subset compatible with the original, since that way they'll run
on my Tandy 6000 and AT&T 7300s. (Oh, I do document even my simplest
scripts, since there are several that have been evolving for a decade
and a half, since my days as a Tandy tech support guy).
I'm in the same situation as Cappy, a programmer playing a sysadmin on TV.
But for me, our NT machines (after the 10th format) are stable (our fax
server has been running well for ~3 months without a reboot, even with
SP3!) and the Linux and FreeBSD boxen are even more so.
Perl has been a godsend for me, since it allows me to write fairly
intricate system-related programs with good portablilty between the Unix
and NT machines. In fact, I have one larger program (~ 7,500 lines) which
performs some automated ftp uploading of client's files that has been
running without a hitch for more than 6 months! I think I've made less
than a dozen mods during that time, while the system was still on-line,
and just killed and restarted without missing a beat. I used to do any
CGI-web stuff in C. Halfway through a project to allow clients to have
access to status information in a MSSQL database on an NT server (web
server is Linux/Apache) I tried Perl; I finished 3 weeks *ahead* of
schedule! When was the last time that happened??? And using the Sypberl
module, I was able to connect to the MSSQL server on the first try. Damn!
And you want to rag on Perl?
And I
challenge you to find any "non-worst" aspects of awk. After
almost 16
years, I still can't use it without having the man page
immediately at hand.