7 ms·

"Picking up the basics of a language is easy, but it's knowing the nuisance that separates the professional from the amateur." From learning perspective correc

"Picking up the basics of a language is easy, but it's knowing the nuisance that separates the professional from the amateur." From learning perspective correct. I don't think developers chase new languages, I think it's more, play 'catch up to latest language' to be more employable. You would hope companies, CTOs, lead techs choose languages to solve the unique business problems. Language choice looks more, to me, like taste. Like choosing something ^nice^ from a menu at a restaurant depending on what is palatable.

segmondy 10y ago
I can't tell, I know many developers today who are on the new shiny js thing, golang, elixir, scalar, rust train, but they never got really good in their first language be it Java, python, or php. They use linux or OSX. But they don't know awk/sed/bash, give em a very simple problem, they would write 1000 line of OOP, united test code when a few line of scripts would solve it. I know many programmers, who graduated with a CS degree, they go out of their way to implement ridiculous rule engines and overly complicated systems, when they can just use prolog and glue their app to prolog. I've witnessed many so called fullstack developers who break out in cold sweat at the sight or thought of writing SQL. They want an ORM. This is what I call chasing, new things, when the old things are rock solid. I see this today, where people cry about PHP, but yet don't even use it's good features. Go use NoSQL solutions but never even had a clue about their SQL DB. /rant
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  > They use linux or OSX. But they don't know awk/sed/bash Am I in the minority of developers then? I don't know awk and sed and I'm honestly not very interested in learning them. But bash I definitely agree with. I still use a cheatsheet to get the syntax right because it's weird as hell imo.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    There's no reason to use awk or sed when perl exists (a2p and s2p have existed for decades)
    - kazinator 10y ago
      There is no reason to use perl in situation when awk kicks its butt with clearer, shorter code free of distracting sigils and other line noise Awk is also POSIX standard; a good remaining reason to use it (if it is a feasible alternative for a task) is that a script has to be portable outside of GNU/Linux.
      - tripa 10y ago
        I like Perl a lot better than awk, buy I do agree with the general sentiment of using the language that makes for the clearest code for the task at hand, especially the smaller ones. Which makes me a frequent awk proponent. So I'm surprised at the following part of your comment: > There is no reason to use perl in situation when awk kicks its butt with clearer, shorter code free of distracting author and other line noise In my experience, the shorter ask code tends to be the one with sigils.
        jhbadger 10y ago
        But in a lot of ways awk seems way more modern than Perl (Perl 5 at least). You actually have functions with parameters rather than having a weird @_ array that you need to shift values from. Honestly, if I didn't know otherwise, I'd think awk came after Perl.
        vgy7ujm 10y ago
        Functions with parameters in a () is already in Perl 5. Search for subroutine signatures. http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsub.html#Signatures http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsub.html#Signatures
  - sokoloff 10y ago
    Worth reading "Area Number Three" on this blog post from Steve Yegge: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-questions https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho...
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      Isn't that just a `grep -R [regex pattern]`? Not sure where something like awk or sed fits in to solve such a problem.
      - sokoloff 10y ago
        The primary point was one of mindset, but the second example in the cited section is a tailor-made sed example: Let's say you're on my team, and I've decided I'm a real stickler for code formatting. But I've got peculiar tastes, and one day I decide I want to have all parentheses stand out very clearly in your code. So let's say you've got a set of source files in C, C++, or Java. Your choice. And I want you to modify them so that in each source file, every open- and close-paren has exactly one space character before and after
        Cyph0n 10y ago
        Whoops, didn't notice that one. Thanks for linking that post by the way. Great read.
        sokoloff 10y ago
        Most Yegge blog rants are well worthwhile, IMO. I wish he wrote more of them.
        dgacmu 10y ago
        Y'know - after thinking about it a little, I'd argue that this is a question that could serve a second purpose. The obvious out-of-the box implementations of this in sed/perl/etc. would all fail to properly handle open and close parens in strings and comments. Particularly multi-line comments and strings with escaped quotation marks inside of them. I like sed. I like perl one-liners. I would consider it a mistake to try to do this on a real codebase in a batch manner with just a regexp. You'd be far better off googling to find a source code formatter that includes a real parser, like clang-format.
  - robalfonso 10y ago
    awk and sed are fantastic for command line processing of text. You really should take a look at them. All that said, if you don't find yourself trying to do something in bash and thinking "there must be an easier way" then you're problem sets may just not need them.
    - wruza 10y ago
      edit: comment was about perl, I didn't notice discussion below
  - bootload 10y ago
    "I don't know awk and sed and I'm honestly not very interested in learning them. But bash I definitely agree with." Awk/Sed are optimised for text/data processing.[0] While Bash might work, will the script work on all systems (and version)? [1] awk & predecessor sed are good for one liner programs and suitable for problems that need fast, reliable solutions. reference [0] Opening, closing files; reading, breaking and counting record fields. [1] OS use Bash or Bourne? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#Portability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#Portability
    - freehunter 10y ago
      Then again, sed works differently on different platforms, and awk is not the same as gawk or nawk, both of which have many more features than standard awk. If you're used to the GNU implementation, you might be surprised to find your script doesn't work on a system without the gawk implementation. On Linux, I can use this sed command: sed -i ‘s/^”//’ example.txt That deletes any quotation marks that are at the beginning of a line. It does it in-place, and while you have the option to rename the old file and replace it with a new file with the original name (using "sed -i.bak ‘s/^”//’ example.txt" would move the existing example.txt file to example.txt.bak and write a new one in-place), if you leave out the .bak, it just writes it in-place with no backup file. On OS X, though, that command won't work. You have to specify a backup file, even if it's blank. "sed -i “” ‘s/^”//’ example.txt" would replace the text in-place without a backup. sed -i “.bak” ‘s/^”//’ example.txt would replace the file and move the original to "example.txt.bak". Even with sed and awk, you still have to stop and wonder if it will work cross-platform.
      - wcarron 10y ago
        This is why I have gripes about the OS X command line. I can't confidently use the scripts I do on Ubuntu/Mint/Debian. Like, get with the program, Apple. It infuriates me and I'm moving entirely off their platform as soon as my Mac kicks the bucket.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - rcdmd 10y ago
    I don't think you are in the minority, assuming you have a reasonable way to quickly parse text. I think most developers just Google for one-liners or throw something together in Python to solve text-parsing tasks at hand, rather then trying to remember which tool uses which type of regex with which argument.
  - dsacco 10y ago
    If you're getting along fine without awk then by all means, don't learn it. But just today I had to quickly get a raw list of all US area codes (and only area codes). After a short Google search, I realized the fastest way of downloading and formatting it without having to do a secondary step was this: curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kedarmhaswade/cities/master/area-codes.csv | \ awk -F, '{print $1}' \ > ~/area_codes.txt Now, could you use grep? Yeah, sure. But for really quick examples like this - things that lend themselves to it (e.g. a raw CSV with mostly crap you don't need but something you do), this is super fast. Anything more complicated and I'd break out a regex, though.
- sokoloff 10y ago
  I break out in a sweat contemplating how to get an ORM to efficiently do something that would be simple in straight SQL...
  - bitexploder 10y ago
    Use SQLAlchemy, ORM gets easy :)
- rcdmd 10y ago
  Agreed for the most part, although we should acknowledge that those "new and shiny JS things" make for some extraordinary RAD times and generally don't take too long to learn (at least to become productive). They may have serious limitations, but for side-projects developers can get to an MVP with haste.
  - bootload 10y ago
    "for side-projects developers can get to an MVP with haste." That's the caveat you want to hear. Also Facebook with php and HHVM [0] not wanting to break things too much. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_Virtual_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_Virtual_Machine
- mikekchar 10y ago
  I think that's fair enough, but I'm not sure I equate one to the other. Your examples are complaining about a lack of exposure to different kinds of tools that already exist rather than lack of depth in tools that the developers use. Although grossly unfair, it's sometimes instructive to split people in two categories in order to consider a point. With that in mind, I notice that there are programmers who want to learn as little as possible in order to get the job done. They want tools to make things easy for them so they don't have to understand the underlying concepts. How many times over the decades have I had to unwind bad commits in source code repositories because some programmer refuses to learn how to use the software directly and leaves their IDE to do it for them? Same again for build systems. How many times have I worked with programmers who refuse to understand what a pointer is, because now that we have GC apparently we don't have to worry about leaking resources? How many programmers never bother to learn the syntax of the language, preferring to generate snippets and cut and paste from StackOverflow (or back in the old days, you would have entire applications built primarily from cutting and pasting examples from MSDN)? Yeah, this is a problem (and has been a problem for as long as I've been a professional programmer -- i.e., a long time ;-) ). But the people who are chasing after the new shiny don't really exhibit that attitude for me. To the extent that everybody who wants to work tomorrow has to keep learning, no good developer is exempt from this. But I find the people who really chase new stuff without getting a proper grounding in the old stuff have a few overwhelming things in common. They are young (to the industry). They are excited. They want to learn. My experience has been that if you show them the very, very cool things you can do with awk/sed/bash/prolog (Really? You use prolog!? I'm seriously impressed) they will get similarly excited by that.
  - jodrellblank 10y ago
    Really, you use Prolog (in the shell)? What for - have you blogged about it anywhere?
- bluedino 10y ago
  Interviewer: sort this file of 1,000 names. Here's a Linux laptop. Candidate 1: writes some Python code Candidate 2: writes some C++ Candidate 3: runs "sort names.txt"
  - wcarron 10y ago
    I'm pretty new to the industry, being young, but as soon as I got a machine to run a Linux VM on, I spent hours reading docs and man pages and books on Bash and general *nix commands. Definitely helped me become a better programmer. It's amazing what you can do with simple POSIX commands. I didn't even know about sort until now, but it'll help me a bunch now.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
      Run `info coreutils` and get a general sense of the tools available. There are things you'll use all the time like sort, uniq and wc. Things you'll use occasionally (`foo | column -s $'\t' -t` reads all the lines of standard input, splits each on a tab and then lines everything up in nice columns) and things you might rarely need, but when you need them they're amazing: tsort, for example, is really useful for managing dependencies in certain circumstances.
  - bootload 10y ago
    Candidates ask no questions?
  - fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
    Although, it'd be fairly simple to do this in python: python3 -c 'import sys; list(print(line.strip()) for line in sorted(sys.stdin, key=str.lower))'

segmondy 10y ago

I can't tell, I know many developers today who are on the new shiny js thing, golang, elixir, scalar, rust train, but they never got really good in their first language be it Java, python, or php. They use linux or OSX. But they don't know awk/sed/bash, give em a very simple problem, they would write 1000 line of OOP, united test code when a few line of scripts would solve it. I know many programmers, who graduated with a CS degree, they go out of their way to implement ridiculous rule engines and overly complicated systems, when they can just use prolog and glue their app to prolog. I've witnessed many so called fullstack developers who break out in cold sweat at the sight or thought of writing SQL. They want an ORM. This is what I call chasing, new things, when the old things are rock solid. I see this today, where people cry about PHP, but yet don't even use it's good features. Go use NoSQL solutions but never even had a clue about their SQL DB. /rant

Cyph0n 10y ago
> They use linux or OSX. But they don't know awk/sed/bash Am I in the minority of developers then? I don't know awk and sed and I'm honestly not very interested in learning them. But bash I definitely agree with. I still use a cheatsheet to get the syntax right because it's weird as hell imo.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  There's no reason to use awk or sed when perl exists (a2p and s2p have existed for decades)
  - kazinator 10y ago
    There is no reason to use perl in situation when awk kicks its butt with clearer, shorter code free of distracting sigils and other line noise Awk is also POSIX standard; a good remaining reason to use it (if it is a feasible alternative for a task) is that a script has to be portable outside of GNU/Linux.
    - tripa 10y ago
      I like Perl a lot better than awk, buy I do agree with the general sentiment of using the language that makes for the clearest code for the task at hand, especially the smaller ones. Which makes me a frequent awk proponent. So I'm surprised at the following part of your comment: > There is no reason to use perl in situation when awk kicks its butt with clearer, shorter code free of distracting author and other line noise In my experience, the shorter ask code tends to be the one with sigils.
      - jhbadger 10y ago
        But in a lot of ways awk seems way more modern than Perl (Perl 5 at least). You actually have functions with parameters rather than having a weird @_ array that you need to shift values from. Honestly, if I didn't know otherwise, I'd think awk came after Perl.
        vgy7ujm 10y ago
        Functions with parameters in a () is already in Perl 5. Search for subroutine signatures. http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsub.html#Signatures http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsub.html#Signatures
- sokoloff 10y ago
  Worth reading "Area Number Three" on this blog post from Steve Yegge: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-questions https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho...
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    Isn't that just a `grep -R [regex pattern]`? Not sure where something like awk or sed fits in to solve such a problem.
    - sokoloff 10y ago
      The primary point was one of mindset, but the second example in the cited section is a tailor-made sed example: Let's say you're on my team, and I've decided I'm a real stickler for code formatting. But I've got peculiar tastes, and one day I decide I want to have all parentheses stand out very clearly in your code. So let's say you've got a set of source files in C, C++, or Java. Your choice. And I want you to modify them so that in each source file, every open- and close-paren has exactly one space character before and after
      - Cyph0n 10y ago
        Whoops, didn't notice that one. Thanks for linking that post by the way. Great read.
        sokoloff 10y ago
        Most Yegge blog rants are well worthwhile, IMO. I wish he wrote more of them.
      - dgacmu 10y ago
        Y'know - after thinking about it a little, I'd argue that this is a question that could serve a second purpose. The obvious out-of-the box implementations of this in sed/perl/etc. would all fail to properly handle open and close parens in strings and comments. Particularly multi-line comments and strings with escaped quotation marks inside of them. I like sed. I like perl one-liners. I would consider it a mistake to try to do this on a real codebase in a batch manner with just a regexp. You'd be far better off googling to find a source code formatter that includes a real parser, like clang-format.
- robalfonso 10y ago
  awk and sed are fantastic for command line processing of text. You really should take a look at them. All that said, if you don't find yourself trying to do something in bash and thinking "there must be an easier way" then you're problem sets may just not need them.
  - wruza 10y ago
    edit: comment was about perl, I didn't notice discussion below
- bootload 10y ago
  "I don't know awk and sed and I'm honestly not very interested in learning them. But bash I definitely agree with." Awk/Sed are optimised for text/data processing.[0] While Bash might work, will the script work on all systems (and version)? [1] awk & predecessor sed are good for one liner programs and suitable for problems that need fast, reliable solutions. reference [0] Opening, closing files; reading, breaking and counting record fields. [1] OS use Bash or Bourne? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#Portability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)#Portability
  - freehunter 10y ago
    Then again, sed works differently on different platforms, and awk is not the same as gawk or nawk, both of which have many more features than standard awk. If you're used to the GNU implementation, you might be surprised to find your script doesn't work on a system without the gawk implementation. On Linux, I can use this sed command: sed -i ‘s/^”//’ example.txt That deletes any quotation marks that are at the beginning of a line. It does it in-place, and while you have the option to rename the old file and replace it with a new file with the original name (using "sed -i.bak ‘s/^”//’ example.txt" would move the existing example.txt file to example.txt.bak and write a new one in-place), if you leave out the .bak, it just writes it in-place with no backup file. On OS X, though, that command won't work. You have to specify a backup file, even if it's blank. "sed -i “” ‘s/^”//’ example.txt" would replace the text in-place without a backup. sed -i “.bak” ‘s/^”//’ example.txt would replace the file and move the original to "example.txt.bak". Even with sed and awk, you still have to stop and wonder if it will work cross-platform.
    - wcarron 10y ago
      This is why I have gripes about the OS X command line. I can't confidently use the scripts I do on Ubuntu/Mint/Debian. Like, get with the program, Apple. It infuriates me and I'm moving entirely off their platform as soon as my Mac kicks the bucket.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
- rcdmd 10y ago
  I don't think you are in the minority, assuming you have a reasonable way to quickly parse text. I think most developers just Google for one-liners or throw something together in Python to solve text-parsing tasks at hand, rather then trying to remember which tool uses which type of regex with which argument.
- dsacco 10y ago
  If you're getting along fine without awk then by all means, don't learn it. But just today I had to quickly get a raw list of all US area codes (and only area codes). After a short Google search, I realized the fastest way of downloading and formatting it without having to do a secondary step was this: curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kedarmhaswade/cities/master/area-codes.csv | \ awk -F, '{print $1}' \ > ~/area_codes.txt Now, could you use grep? Yeah, sure. But for really quick examples like this - things that lend themselves to it (e.g. a raw CSV with mostly crap you don't need but something you do), this is super fast. Anything more complicated and I'd break out a regex, though.
sokoloff 10y ago
I break out in a sweat contemplating how to get an ORM to efficiently do something that would be simple in straight SQL...
- bitexploder 10y ago
  Use SQLAlchemy, ORM gets easy :)
rcdmd 10y ago
Agreed for the most part, although we should acknowledge that those "new and shiny JS things" make for some extraordinary RAD times and generally don't take too long to learn (at least to become productive). They may have serious limitations, but for side-projects developers can get to an MVP with haste.
- bootload 10y ago
  "for side-projects developers can get to an MVP with haste." That's the caveat you want to hear. Also Facebook with php and HHVM [0] not wanting to break things too much. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_Virtual_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_Virtual_Machine
mikekchar 10y ago
I think that's fair enough, but I'm not sure I equate one to the other. Your examples are complaining about a lack of exposure to different kinds of tools that already exist rather than lack of depth in tools that the developers use. Although grossly unfair, it's sometimes instructive to split people in two categories in order to consider a point. With that in mind, I notice that there are programmers who want to learn as little as possible in order to get the job done. They want tools to make things easy for them so they don't have to understand the underlying concepts. How many times over the decades have I had to unwind bad commits in source code repositories because some programmer refuses to learn how to use the software directly and leaves their IDE to do it for them? Same again for build systems. How many times have I worked with programmers who refuse to understand what a pointer is, because now that we have GC apparently we don't have to worry about leaking resources? How many programmers never bother to learn the syntax of the language, preferring to generate snippets and cut and paste from StackOverflow (or back in the old days, you would have entire applications built primarily from cutting and pasting examples from MSDN)? Yeah, this is a problem (and has been a problem for as long as I've been a professional programmer -- i.e., a long time ;-) ). But the people who are chasing after the new shiny don't really exhibit that attitude for me. To the extent that everybody who wants to work tomorrow has to keep learning, no good developer is exempt from this. But I find the people who really chase new stuff without getting a proper grounding in the old stuff have a few overwhelming things in common. They are young (to the industry). They are excited. They want to learn. My experience has been that if you show them the very, very cool things you can do with awk/sed/bash/prolog (Really? You use prolog!? I'm seriously impressed) they will get similarly excited by that.
- jodrellblank 10y ago
  Really, you use Prolog (in the shell)? What for - have you blogged about it anywhere?
bluedino 10y ago
Interviewer: sort this file of 1,000 names. Here's a Linux laptop. Candidate 1: writes some Python code Candidate 2: writes some C++ Candidate 3: runs "sort names.txt"
- wcarron 10y ago
  I'm pretty new to the industry, being young, but as soon as I got a machine to run a Linux VM on, I spent hours reading docs and man pages and books on Bash and general *nix commands. Definitely helped me become a better programmer. It's amazing what you can do with simple POSIX commands. I didn't even know about sort until now, but it'll help me a bunch now.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
    Run `info coreutils` and get a general sense of the tools available. There are things you'll use all the time like sort, uniq and wc. Things you'll use occasionally (`foo | column -s $'\t' -t` reads all the lines of standard input, splits each on a tab and then lines everything up in nice columns) and things you might rarely need, but when you need them they're amazing: tsort, for example, is really useful for managing dependencies in certain circumstances.
- bootload 10y ago
  Candidates ask no questions?
- fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
  Although, it'd be fairly simple to do this in python: python3 -c 'import sys; list(print(line.strip()) for line in sorted(sys.stdin, key=str.lower))'