Re: Makefile.yp awk -> perl?

[Zvezdan Petkovic <zpetkovic_(_at_)_acm_(_dot_)_org>]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 11:13:13AM -0500, Jesse Kempf wrote:
> Hi, I have yet another idea kicking around after talking with a friend
> about NIS last night. We had just attended a Sun Solaris 10 seminar on
> all the nifty things in Solaris 10, and Sun covered process rights
> management and user rights management facilities now in Solaris. That's
> not the interesting part. The interesting part is that those facilities
> can get their data via NIS. We use OpenBSD NIS servers for Solaris NIS
> clients where I work and we're looking to go to Solaris 10. This means
> that I'm going to be mucking around in Makefile.yp to be able to build
> the maps for process rights management and user rights management. I
> admit freely that I'm part of the new generation of sysadmins who are
> perl whores and do not know awk, and rarely use sed.

Sort of like those new generations of "programmers" who learned to
program only in Java, or at best C++ from some of those shallow college
textbooks (they never heard of Stroustrup's book), and get stunned when
they see *ptr++ etc.  Should we swith the kernel to Java or some
crippled C++ then?

> Thus, when I write the targets for prm and urm maps, I'm going to
> write everything in perl.  Since I'm going to be there anyway, should
> I go ahead and re-implement everything else in perl, then kick back
> patches?

I for sure wouldn't care for them.

> Granted, Makefile.yp works, but the targets look like incomprehensible
> line noise and as the years move on, fewer and fewer people will know
> awk.

Why?
Because they spend so much time learning all the features of Perl they
do not have a week free to learn awk and sed.
I wrote a lot of stuff in Perl.
But for the simple things awk and sed are unbeatable.
Reading "The AWK Programming Language" takes one evening,
and makes everybody a better programmer in _any_ language.
A gem.

Best regards,

	Zvezdan Petkovic