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Perl and the Operator/Stream Paradigm

NoSQL uses the OperatorStreamParadigm?. The main reason why I decided to turn the original RDB system into NoSQL is that the former is entirely written in Perl. Perl is a good programming language for writing self-contained programs, but Perl's pre-compilation phase and long start-up time are worth paying only if once the program has loaded it can do everything in one go. This contrasts sharply with theOperatorStreamParadigm, where operators are chained together in pipelines of two, three or more programs. The overhead associated with initializing Perl at every stage of the pipeline makes pipelining Perl inefficient. A better way of manipulating structured ASCII files is using the AWK programming language, which is much smaller than Perl, is more specialized for this task, and is very fast at startup. On my Pentium-II Debian GNU/Linux /usr/bin/mawk (POSIX AWK) is just 99K. Perl 5 is almost 500K. You get the point.