4 ms·
Yes that too... "the kids of today" seem to regard basic shell tools and scripting as a dark art rather than an everyday part of using a computer and doing deve
by tacostakohashi 5y ago
Yes that too... "the kids of today" seem to regard basic shell tools and scripting as a dark art rather than an everyday part of using a computer and doing development productively. It's kind of sad.
- klabb3 5y agoI can't speak for others but personally I've never built up enough motivation to learn shell scripts (and related hackery like awk and sed) properly, even though I've learnt maybe 5-10 programming languages quite well and use the shell interactively all the time. I can't explain with certainty why, but I think it's due to lack of discoverability, inconsistent conventions for flags and positionals, esoteric syntax for simple control flow, lack of errors/feedback for things like undefined variables, no scoping/namespaces, unclear type system (not asking for much, strings, bools and ints would suffice). That said, piping/streaming is amazing and often better than in modern languages. In short, it's quite different from other imperative languages - the design feels arbitrary and the learnings non-transferable, even though I know it is useful and ubiquitous.
- jessaustin 5y agoIIRC, one could have said the same of "the kids of" twenty years ago. It still blows my mind that I didn't learn scripting at university. Could it have been because all the CS classes insisted on tcsh? My first job, I was using an internal tool and thought to myself "this could be better". My boss said "call this guy", and a brief phone call completely changed my understanding of Unix.