{"id":94395,"date":"2016-09-27T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-27T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=94395"},"modified":"2019-03-13T11:07:15","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T18:07:15","slug":"20160927-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20160927-00\/?p=94395","title":{"rendered":"What’s up with Windows developer tools being written in perl?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Worf noticed that a number of developer tools are written in perl and wonders what’s up with that<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Simple: Perl is a socially-acceptable form of Visual Basic. <\/p>\n

In other words, just like how Visual Basic is a great way to throw together a quick little GUI program, perl is a great way to throw together a quick little developer tool. In both cases, the language is loose enough to let you get away with a lot of sloppy coding techniques, and a lack of discipline can result in an unreadable mess.¹ <\/p>\n

The difference is that whereas people look down on Visual Basic programmers as talentless hacks who couldn’t code their way out of a paper bag, people look at perl programmers as wizards who can perform miracles with their arcane incantations that to the uninitiated are indistinguishable from line noise.² <\/p>\n

¹ I’m not saying that the developer tools are an unreadable mess. Just that it’s easy to write an unreadable mess in perl. <\/p>\n

² You can tell I’m an old timer because I said “line noise”. Kids these days have never experienced line noise. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s socially acceptable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-94395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

It’s socially acceptable.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}