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Lots of programs can communicate with JSON, XML, standard formats like that. If some legacy program outputs a non-standardized kind of output, that's a problem

by mbrock 10y ago

Lots of programs can communicate with JSON, XML, standard formats like that. If some legacy program outputs a non-standardized kind of output, that's a problem to be solved, not an inherent failure of shell scripting. There is no overarching successful solution to the problem of different programs using different data representations, but I don't blame this on shell; I work happily with shell scripts as do many many others. The same problem shows up the minute you want to use a Ruby module from Python, and rewriting everything in every language is not an economically viable solution.

lmm 10y ago
> Lots of programs can communicate with JSON, XML, standard formats like that. If some legacy program outputs a non-standardized kind of output, that's a problem to be solved, not an inherent failure of shell scripting. But the shell language itself is one of these legacy non-standardized formats. Arcane escaping rules, multiple incompatible implementations, surprising ways things get interpreted as code (e.g. the recent bash CGI bug),...