Perl Power Tools: Why?
Here's why we're doing it:
- Laziness:
I'm tired of wasting my life trying to cobble together make-shift
work-arounds to do the job of fundamental tools that are broken or
absent on systems various and sundry. And if it's hard on me,
imagine the poor guys on systems I must charitably refer to as
tool-challenged, those lacking even these most fundamental of
programmer tools.
- Impatience:
I get more than a bit impatient when someone has some simple problem
that can be trivially done using one or three basic commands, but
when I tell them how to do it, they whinge about not being on a
proper Unix system and how they therefore can't do the obvious
thing.
- Hubris:
It's listed last, but this is the most important reason -- simply
being able to say that we did it. Why do we climb mountains?
Why do we learn to ski? Because it's there, and because it's fun!
Not only can most basic commands be implemented using just a wee bit
of Perl code, once these have been done, they're automatically much
more powerful and more robust than the old versions. No more
line-too-long errors. No more fixed-buffer problems. Any pattern
matching is automatically turbo-charged. While we don't expect anyone
to replace a functioning /bin (if they have one), these
should make good example Perl programs.
Here's my original notice to the Perl
development team announcing the project.