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I don't understand why you're being so harshly downvoted. This seems ... plausibly correct to me? Some questions: 1) Where do you draw the line, and move away

I don't understand why you're being so harshly downvoted. This seems ... plausibly correct to me? Some questions: 1) Where do you draw the line, and move away from shell to a "real" language. If I just want want to view a directory, surely I use ls, right? What about if I want to remove all leading whitespace from a text file? This can be done with a short but fairly opaque awk one-liner. Probably takes way more time to write and run the Python equivalent, but I don't know Python so well, so maybe it's also a one-liner. 2) What's the optimal "real language" for replacing shell? Python? Perl? Raku? 2a) xargs automatically parallelizes programs. How can this be done efficiently (meaning I don't have to write much additional code) in your proposed "real language"?

dagw 5y ago
xargs automatically parallelizes programs. How can this be done efficiently (meaning I don't have to write much additional code) in your proposed "real language"? By using xargs :) Or more likely gnu parallel. But seriously, in so many cases using GNU parallel to parallelize a process is the quickest and easiest way to approach the problem, and I use it all the time. If I need to process 10k+ images in a folder, rather than try to parallelize the process in my python/C script I'll write the fastest possible single threaded script that takes its input args as command line arguments and then uses gnu parallel to distribute the workload. The added advantage is that I can distribute this work on a cluster of machines with only a few changes to GNU Parallel's command line arguments.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
We had a rule at my old workplace that any shell script that's over a page of code was to be replaced with a Python script. We chose Python because guaranteed there would always be an up to date version of Python on any cloud machine we used, but you could certainly make a case for some other language. In a vacuum, my choice might be Scheme.

dagw 5y ago

xargs automatically parallelizes programs. How can this be done efficiently (meaning I don't have to write much additional code) in your proposed "real language"? By using xargs :) Or more likely gnu parallel. But seriously, in so many cases using GNU parallel to parallelize a process is the quickest and easiest way to approach the problem, and I use it all the time. If I need to process 10k+ images in a folder, rather than try to parallelize the process in my python/C script I'll write the fastest possible single threaded script that takes its input args as command line arguments and then uses gnu parallel to distribute the workload. The added advantage is that I can distribute this work on a cluster of machines with only a few changes to GNU Parallel's command line arguments.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

We had a rule at my old workplace that any shell script that's over a page of code was to be replaced with a Python script. We chose Python because guaranteed there would always be an up to date version of Python on any cloud machine we used, but you could certainly make a case for some other language. In a vacuum, my choice might be Scheme.