Guido van Rossum

And you are also not sort of misled into putting them where they don't belong because you don't learn about them in the first place.

Many of other details that they have to pay attention to.

So I think they'll still get the message about –

paying attention to detail.

That is a historical thing.

There is a whole lineage of programming languages.

PHP is one.

Perl was one.

The Unix shell is one of the oldest, or all the different shells.

The dollar was invented for that purpose because the very earliest shells had a notion of scripting, but they did not have a notion of parameterizing the scripting.

Right.

And so a script is just a few lines of text.

where each line of text is a command that is read by a very primitive command processor that then sort of takes the first word on the line as the name of a program and passes all the rest of the line as text into the program for the program to figure out what to do with as arguments.

And so by the time scripting was slightly more mature than the very first script,

There was a convention that just like the first word of the line is the name of the program, the following words could be names of files.

Input.txt, output.html, things like that.

The next thing that happens is, oh, it would actually be really nice if we could have variables and especially parameters for scripts.

Parameters are usually what starts this process.

But now you have a problem because you can't just say the parameters are x, y, and z. And so now we call, say, let's say x is the input file and y is the output file.

And let's forget about z for now.