From Newsgroup: comp.lang.fortran

Lawrence DrCOOliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sat, 10 Jan 2026 21:20:47 -0000 (UTC), Thomas Koenig wrote:

Around 1989, I got access to UNIX workstations and also worked in C
and various script languages, especially Perl.

What else was there in terms of rCLscriptingrCY at the time?

In those days, rCLscriptingrCY meant rCLinterpretedrCY, which in turn meant rCLslowrCY. Perl managed to break the mould by compiling to an
intermediate byte-code form, which made it fast enough to be a real productivity booster for many common quick-and-dirty programming
tasks.

First "byte-code form" is wrong, it was more like parse tree.
At that time compiling to intermediate form was pretty standard
for "interpreted" languages. Awk, Basic, Emacs Lisp among others
did that.

I did some measurements and despite claim in the Perl manual Perl
was not faster than awk or sed. When I did this I did not compare
with other alternatives, but later tests indicated that Perl was
in the middle of the pack.

Of course, there are languages that are really slow, like Unix
shell or Berkeley Logo. In case of Berkely Logo main source of
slowness is that it performed file system search for possible
command extentions at each step. Shell is less aggressive
with file system searches, but has it own reason for slowness.

I would point to Perl as the start of the wave of rCLmetaprogrammingrCY languages (by which he meant rCLvery-high-levelrCY languages) that Fred Brooks predicted in the final edition of his classic book rCLThe
Mythical Man-MonthrCY.

His own proposed example, AppleScript, is probably best forgotten.

I do not think so. Already before Perl there were various rCLvery-high-levelrCY languages. And Perl 4 was not rCLvery-high-levelrCY. Relatively early it was recognized that for several tasks
machine efficiency matters only a little. Time when Perl
appeared coincide with time that reasonably powerful computers
become widely available and higher level languages started
to matter for a lot of people.

In my view, main factor for Perl was that it was more capable
than sed or awk. And unlike now forgotten languages it
blended nicely into Unix culture. Unix gave it good start,
portablity and a fact that it was open source helped it to
spread and survive. And once it was widely availeble
people stated to abuse it to solve new tasks, beyond original
design goals.
--
Waldek Hebisch
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