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It's up there with bash Clearly you've just arrived from some wonderful alternate universe where bash means something different than it does on Earth. Welcome
by seagreen 10y ago
It's up there with bash
Clearly you've just arrived from some wonderful alternate universe where bash means something different than it does on Earth. Welcome traveler!
bash is the world's default shell for a reason
Here on Earth that reason is network effects ("If I write it in bash, it will run anywhere!"). Bash is an bad language. If you've mastered bash you can have the honorable feeling of mastering a difficult, ugly, but practical skill (see also: knife-fighting, driving a motor vehicle, running for office). But there's no need to be mean to SQLite by comparing the two.
- jsmthrowaway 10y agoFunny, I instead had that reaction to nano being there after I read "good at their job." I mean, that's one way of looking at nano, I suppose, depending on how you define "job"...
- witty_username 10y agoYeah, nano is good for people like me used to GUI editors but it isn't amazingly good.
- glormph 10y agoI figured the poster was just avoiding naming either text editor that gives around half of the HN population kneejerk responses.
- JdeBP 10y agoBrief versus WordStar yet again? (-: This would cast nano in the rôle of Tedit, of course.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoPartly because listing emacs or vim would launch a flame war, but Nano's intent is to be a small text editor, friendly enough for newbies, to handle small jobs, like writing an email, or editing /etc/fstab. And it does that pretty well.
- jsmthrowaway 10y agoBut you listed emacs?
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoI forgot I did that. It was because Emacs is really technically impressive. It's a bit ugly in places, but on the whole, it's remarkably well designed.
- ufo 10y agoThe internals of bash's implementation are also notoriously awful. Its one of those legacy C code bases that are very hard to work on.
- oblio 10y agoWasn't that sh (aka Bourne shell)? With the infamous "Pascal macros": http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/sh/mac.h http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/... Or is bash just as bad?
- laumars 10y agoOh my, browsing around that repo and some of versions of sh[1] has possibly the worst C I've seen in production. Do you know the reasons for the "Pascal macros" as they don't even make the C code Pascal compliant? [1] http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/cmd/sh http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/...
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoDo you mean the ALGOL macros, which transform C into the so-called “BourneGOL”? They're there because Mr. Bourne liked ALGOL a lot.
- laumars 10y agoALGOL would make sense too. Thank you for the explanation.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoBash is a clone of sh, but it has its own problems.
- david-given 10y ago
- audleman 10y agoBrutality
- chungy 10y agoWhat's so bad about bash?
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoWell, you learn something new every day. I guess I'm switching to ZSH now...
- virtualwhys 10y ago> Bash is an bad language Totally OT but, "it's an bird, it's an plane, it's superman!", doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, and neither does the above[1]. [1] http://www.grammar.com/a-vs-an-when-to-use/ http://www.grammar.com/a-vs-an-when-to-use/
- nandhp 10y agoPresumably the original sentence was something like "bash is an abysmal language" and OP forgot to change the article when they replaced "abysmal" with "bad". This happens to me regularly.
- virtualwhys 10y agoYeah, just tough to read, really jarring. I can read right through typos but for some reason this particular grammatical error is arggghhh inducing ;-)
- seagreen 10y agoThanks. Too late to edit it now though. And nandhp's detective work was right, the adjective was originally "awful".
- kragen 10y agoBefore bash was the world's default shell, it was csh, then tcsh. At my university, if you switched your shell to bash, the sysadmins would put you under extra scrutiny, suspecting you were a Linux user and thus likely to cause trouble. We switched to a default shell with incompatible syntax not because of network effects but because it was much better than tcsh — initially just for scripting, later for interactive use as well. zsh already existed at that point, btw. As for mastering bash? Nobody masters bash. Brian Fox hasn't mastered bash.