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My first programming job was on a telephone exchange system that was 50k lines of sed, awk, and korn shell.
by snarfy 7y ago
My first programming job was on a telephone exchange system that was 50k lines of sed, awk, and korn shell.
- sigzero 7y agoI'm sorry. ;)
- snarfy 7y agolol. It was a complete system with accounts, billing, 'tui' screens, all glued together by scripts, kron jobs, and awk text processing. It definitely embodied The Unix Way™ of everything is a file and small tools you can pipe in/out to to build larger systems. They did.
- mikeyjk 7y agoHow did that function in terms of maintenance? Was it clear where bugs existed or where new functionality needed added? I'm curious as I've never gotten to work on a system like that before.
- snarfy 7y agoNew features? They started rewriting it shortly after I was hired. Maintenance issues were always fixed by the grey beards. One of them was blind and used a talk box, a wyse terminal, and vi.
- nickpeterson 7y agoThat sounds like a man who could handle his abstractions.
- dublin 7y agoIt can work quite well, especially when combined with other tools that leverage the same kind of model, such as, say, Carlo Strozzi's NoSQL (his use of the term predates and is totally different from what we think of today as NoSQL), or even things like text/cli-based accounting systems. The modularity and focus on each thing doing one specific thing makes maintenance a breeze, assuming you're familiar with the tools.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoWe had a CAD workstation management with user management, backup and restore, plotting management and a lot of other stuff. Everything built with ksh. It worked really well at the time.