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.
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.
As another “devops-y” guy (I’m essentially a sysadmin, but i accept whatever job title is trending right now) i agree on everything. It’s nice to see (from a distance) all the bs developers have to endure on a daily basis knowing it doesn’t affect me much.
Also… a lot of that complexity is essentially self-inflicted.
I must say however: “devops” is completely different from what old-school system administration used to be.
>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.
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.
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.
