How did vbscript die? How did php die? Better alternatives came along and sucked up the oxygen.

Don't forget many people were still on dial-up and long forum posts were probably discouraged in favor of RTFM or other terse reply.

It was primarily the exhaustion of experts at tireless waves of newbies who hadn’t studied the available materials.

IRC being async if the client is run locally, modem delays made no difference (just as with QWKmail and forum posts). And for remote host IRC, I don’t remember what the IRC line length limit was but at 300bps you could get an entire message and the buffer scroll updates accompanying it in 1 second, which was well-sufficient enough to support peak volume with no relevant latency. And, I can still type a paragraph at clock seconds of input latency and remember where I’m at when backspacing. So, I would definitely not ascribe a desire for brevity as an outcome of modems.

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 I am familiar with sed, awk, grep and xargs, was I a sysadmin ?

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.

I think it's safe (or maybe prudent) to assume that pretty much all phones, computers, and network switching gear are backdoored by someone.

Yep. I’m just like “pick a technology. I don’t care what, just stick with it long enough to get something done with it”

We also printed several trillion dollars because of a respiratory virus outbreak. That was never not going to inflate the cost of everything.

Boomers are dying off or dead. GenX is getting close to retirement age. What will they do with their inheritance?

Inheritances are going to be evaporated by end of life care

Boomers still run the country.

Sharecropping was very common. And a hard way to earn a subsistence living.