
Taco Bell Programming - andyjpb
http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html
======
yellowapple
Reminds me a bit of "Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines"[0], except
replacing C code with a bunch of stuff in The Cloud™.

The problem with Taco Bell Programming is that those "ingredients" need to be
versatile enough to actually be useful enough to not warrant reinventing their
wheels. Unfortunately, that usually translates into complexity, ever-growing
manpages, etc. If you're only using 8 ingredients, it's pretty unlikely that
any of those ingredients are going to stick to the Unix philosophy of doing
one thing and doing it well.

Additionally, at some point the task does end up being complex enough or
atypical enough to involve coding for different corner cases and such. The
only thing I'd dread more than ten thousand lines of C is ten thousand lines
of Bash.

[0]: [http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-
thousand.html](http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.html)

------
gpapilion
I’m not even sure how to interpret this. It’s sort of a know your tools post,
with a hint of don’t over optimize. Having done both the Hadoop and shell
script type solutions, generally error handling and debugging are what cause
you to move into blatform solutions.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
To me, it was more of an "don't over-engineer" post.

As another example I could see the author using...if you have tasks to run on
a regular basis, do you really need Jenkins? Or will cron do just fine?

------
DLA
There's a lot to be said for this approach. With the size of today's machines
(say a TB of RAM, 16/32/or more cores, many TB of SSD) you can do a stunning
amount of work with smart programming. For example, I've developed a tool to
do some file processing that uses Go's excellent concurrency mechanisms to
reach speeds of ~40-50k files/second on a moderate laptop.

------
dimator
Yes, there's merrit to this, but up to a point. The problem is that the "glue"
you're using to connect your ingredients is bash, and that quickly gets
unwieldy >100 lines or so.

~~~
tluyben2
I always keep cutting to seperate script files which I call. Makes it more
reusable and clearer imho. Like the author, I do a lot in bash and I do not
have scripts even close to 100 lines: I do have 1000s of scripts though. Works
well for me.

