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> That’s the theory but frankly the syntax is so cumbersome, irregular and needs so many googling for "easy" things like conditional, substring, etc. that I now

by tuldia 7y ago

> That’s the theory but frankly the syntax is so cumbersome, irregular and needs so many googling for "easy" things like conditional, substring, etc. that I now use a real programming language if a script needs to be anything more than a list of commands without any logic (besides variables substitution). You are basically describing modern programming. Script Language (or scripting) is a programming language. And about the "real" programming language you can also trap yourself googling and installing yet another library (did you read the code?) and/or reimplementing existing tools from the unix programming environment.

tasogare 7y ago
You are overly pedantic on a detail point that doesn’t matter: yes shell scripting is technically a programming language, but my point is that it is a terrible one worth ditching for any non trivial task. Perl was created precisely more than 3 decades ago to address this problem. Nowadays there are alternatives such as Python, Powershell or even scripting wrapper for compiled languages (such as C#) that allow to do the same job very well, with less surprising behavior and that can be refactored later more easily.
- vaingloriole 7y ago
  I disagree with you wholeheartedly and without condition. Not only are you discounting how much time it takes to learn how to program effectively in a real 'glue' language you are high handed in ignoring the ubiquity, working archive and efficacy of a shell script. Not to mischaracterize but I find this type of attitude most frequently in 'lead' individuals with less than 10 years experience: typically 20's and 30's in age. I'm curious if this is your case?
  - vore 7y ago
    Shell may be super useful to learn but that doesn't mean it's full of horrible footguns that greatly hamper your ability to determine if your code is doing the right thing or not once you get to a significant body of code: just take a look at https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls and compare with other languages that don't have some of the more egregious easy-to-make mistakes (e.g. anything to do with word splitting).

by tuldia 7y ago

tasogare 7y ago

You are overly pedantic on a detail point that doesn’t matter: yes shell scripting is technically a programming language, but my point is that it is a terrible one worth ditching for any non trivial task. Perl was created precisely more than 3 decades ago to address this problem. Nowadays there are alternatives such as Python, Powershell or even scripting wrapper for compiled languages (such as C#) that allow to do the same job very well, with less surprising behavior and that can be refactored later more easily.

vaingloriole 7y ago
I disagree with you wholeheartedly and without condition. Not only are you discounting how much time it takes to learn how to program effectively in a real 'glue' language you are high handed in ignoring the ubiquity, working archive and efficacy of a shell script. Not to mischaracterize but I find this type of attitude most frequently in 'lead' individuals with less than 10 years experience: typically 20's and 30's in age. I'm curious if this is your case?
- vore 7y ago
  Shell may be super useful to learn but that doesn't mean it's full of horrible footguns that greatly hamper your ability to determine if your code is doing the right thing or not once you get to a significant body of code: just take a look at https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls and compare with other languages that don't have some of the more egregious easy-to-make mistakes (e.g. anything to do with word splitting).