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I do: Yesterday when I was looking up how to declare and use arrays in bash for the 1000th time. Bash is probably the #1 reason I end up there through a search.
by kstenerud 6y ago
I do: Yesterday when I was looking up how to declare and use arrays in bash for the 1000th time. Bash is probably the #1 reason I end up there through a search.
After 25 years professional experience (plus 12 years before that), there are a number of reasons why I search for "how to do X in Y" online at least once a week:
- The language is poorly designed and has a lot of unintuitive, unorthogonal, difficult-to-remember parts or nasty footguns, but people continue using this beast-that-cannot-be-slain out of industry inertia (like Bash or CMake).
- The language is in a constant state of flux, adding new features and best practices / idiomatic things, and the cruft-that-must-not-be-used buildup is so insane that even a few years out of the loop makes you feel like a complete beginner (like C++ or Python or JS).
- The language is complicated enough that unless it's your day job you won't remember how to do basic things after a few months away (like Rust or Haskell or Gradle).
- It's been 10 years since you touched it and how the hell do you concatenate a string again???
I think the only languages I can just slide right back into are Java, C#, LUA, and Go (and C, but probably only because I used it daily for decades).
- stevehawk 6y agoman.. I literally just did a job interview where I was asked if I had bash scripting experience, which I do, and my number one thought was "please for the love of god don't ask me how to do anything with it other than pseudocode / general sys adm work'.
- tpoacher 6y agoman bash woefully underused, but has everything and is extremely well written with no fluff.