On: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

[vacri]

> [shell] It becomes especially bad when we try to develop in it, as it’s not a full-fledged programming language.

Who the hell 'develops' in shell? It's a glue language, not a development language. I've never heard anyone say "We're a shell shop".

[gpawl → vacri]

It's a glue language, but it's still painful when you write a shell script.

[dllthomas → vacri]

I spent a year working on ~80k lines of bash. It was an interesting experience.

[rwmj → dllthomas]

You must tell us more :-) For my anecdote, I know people who did 10k+ line final year university projects in AWK and Tcl respectively. The AWK one was a particular act of endurance.

[reciprocity → dllthomas]

Please consider spending some time to write a comment here or a blog post on this experience! I would be very interested to read it.

[vacri → dllthomas]

Was the primary product in bash? Or were you working on glue?

You must have mastered the bizarreness of bash arrays by the end of that :)

[dllthomas → vacri]

The actual product was hosting, more or less, although with some additional constraints that meant more moving parts. The bash grew out of manual scripts to provide automation and a UI for support.

> You must have mastered the bizarreness of bash arrays by the end of that :)

I mastered a lot of the weird corners, though we mostly kept them out of the code. I've forgotten much since.

[JustSomeNobody → dllthomas]

Story time. I'll go get the popcorn.

[contras1970 → vacri]

just like you never hear a carpenter say they have a saw-and-hammer shop. languages are tools, not identities.

anyway, is something like [this] result of development or gluing things together?

[this] https://github.com/roman-neuhauser/haveopt/blob/master/s/hav...