Well, this is how we got stuck with autoconf (of course, then some genius decided m4 was a good idea). Interestingly, sh (at least, the common intersection of

Well, this is how we got stuck with autoconf (of course, then some genius decided m4 was a good idea). Interestingly, sh (at least, the common intersection of all the shells) is a good choice for a language that needs to bootstrap, since pretty much every unix machine has an implementation installed somewhere by default. The way they used it was a little wonky, and if we could go back in time I'd probably suggest generating the configure script from a better language than m4, but it's not the worst of all possible worlds. That is a cool link, thanks for sharing! Somewhere there's a similar article with OCaml that I never got all the way through, though maybe it was more about systems programming than system administration (so, replacing C, not sh).