Making the Break
By Dale Dougherty
When you learn to do something one way and then discover a new way to do it, you find yourself on the edge of making an interesting decision: Should I make a clean break with the past and do I understand what I might gain or lose in making such a break? To illustrate, let me walk through a series of disruptive shifts, from the world of desktop computing to new ways of developing Web applications.
I cut my computing teeth on Unix, where my computer interface was a shell, or command-line interpreter. To automate the work, I could write a shell script. A script, like a DOS batch file, was a set of commands executed as a single command. In shell scripts, it was interesting to pipe (|) the result of one command, such as the contents of a directory listing, to another command that acted as a filter. You could view the end result on the screen. If the data was worth keeping, you could redirect it to a file and save it.
After moving to a graphical-user interface, I stopped writing shell scripts. Yet when the Web came around, scripting became important again. Out of shell scripting evolved Perl, which made available more operating-system services and endless ways to control them to create applications. Perl became the first choice for creating CGI programs, which at first were quick and dirty to write. In a certain way, the Web gave Perl a new user interface. A user could enter a URL to invoke a Perl script, and perhaps as importantly, the result of a Perl script could be referenced by a URL.
While Perl dominated the Web-application space, the alternatives that emerged seemed designed to displace Perl and provide simpler ways to create Web applications.
