From: kim kubik <chaotrope@...>
Date: 2005-08-18T12:46:15+09:00
Subject: Google's Sawzall

This might be of interest to some:

    http://labs.google.com/papers/sawzall.html

(abstract with pointer to PDF of full 29 page paper)

It discusses a special purpose language developed at
Google labs (three of the authors, including Rob
Pike, moved to California from Bell Labs, New Jersey)
but also points to the kind of research //labs.google
has been involved in over the past few years.

The paper includes a little microbenchmark comparison
(page 22) against ruby, perl, python); academic, as
Sawzall is essentially a query language - the comparison
is thus merely for . . . uh, . . . comparison.

Since //labs.google has replaced Murray Hill and Xerox
PARC in CS research, when this paper states, "Sawzall has
become one of the most widely used programming languages
at Google," the statement should not be taken too lightly.

---------------------------------------------------
In the 'Acknowledgments' section of the paper, Paul
Haahr is mentioned, indicating that he too is at Google.
Haahr cowrote the es shell (based on Plan 9's rc shell):

    http://www.webcom.com/~haahr/es/es-usenix-winter93.html

The ideas developed in rc and es might point way to a ruby
syntax shell, which with the Plan 9 plumber:

    http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/plumb.pdf

    (or Unix subset:  http://swtch.com/plan9port/ )

could make a wonderful cohesive integrated system in which
everything, the shell, the scripting language, the macro
language used by applications, are all unified around a
single language/syntax.  Think of it: no more muddle of
bash/elisp/python/whatever/whatever - just one clean
pervasive syntax for the whole system.