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000147_icon-group-sender_Tue Nov 7 08:12:44 2000.msg
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Return-Path: <icon-group-sender>
Received: (from root@localhost)
by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.11.1/8.11.1) id eA7FCgs04013
for icon-group-addresses; Tue, 7 Nov 2000 08:12:42 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200011071512.eA7FCgs04013@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
X-Sender: whm@mail.mse.com
Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2000 03:16:10 -0700
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
From: "William H. Mitchell" <whm@mse.com>
Subject: Re: Why Perl?
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
Status: RO
Content-Length: 1870
At 01:44 PM 11/6/00 -0500, you wrote:
>
>I have used Icon for over a decade. Recently, I went through the Perl
>tutorial. For the most part, I am amazed that Perl has become the dominant
>language for text processing. About the only area where Perl could be
>considered to Icon is in report generation, and even this advantage could be
>obtained in Icon with the appropriate library. Why, then, has Perl become so
>popular while Icon remains (relatively) obscure?
This is a question that I've pondered quite a bit. I believe that system
administrators served as a primary vector of transmission for Perl. I
think that Icon works just fine for the average programmer but, as of
several years ago, Icon didn't offer any leverage at all for programming
relating to system administration -- things like the UNIX stat(2) call just
weren't there. I was an SA at that time and my solution was to simply
write C functions to do what I needed in Icon, but that wasn't a practical
solution for most people. I was also involved with the Icon Project at the
time and although I saw that Icon needed additions to make SA programming
practical, I didn't think that the potential audience -- being maybe 1-5%
system administrators -- justified heavy SA support and I didn't strongly
advocate such additions.
I believe that Perl gained users in the following way. An application
programmer, perhaps working in C, encountered some sort of ancillary
problem that needed a quick solution in the form of a program but that
program wasn't practical to write in C. System administrators often field
general questions from their community of users and when asked about tools
for quick programming solutions, an administrator familiar with Perl was
likely to suggest it. If problems arose with using Perl, the SA could
likely help. Voila! -- another Perl user.
Any other theories?