Don't understand why people "like"/want to rely on shell syntaxext_391771January 14 2011, 19:36:25 UTC
As a developer that finally has had to learn sh/bash scripting (only recently was able to break free from the Win32 world), I find it ironic that one of the complaints about make is, "It's Yet Another Goddamn Syntax you have to learn, with its own stupid quoting and whitespace rules.", and yet later go on to say, "shell, IMHO, is mostly a good language for this kind of thing."
All I could think while reading my bash book was, "Seriously, I have to know this ridiculous arcane syntax now? Ughhh." It's 2010. If anything, I've noticed a renaissance of newer developers finally breaking past old barriers, creating things like git/hg, GSD quite fast with python and ruby, etc. Languages people are very likely to know or have learned would be python, ruby, the C's, javascript, java, possibly some lisp variation. Why oh why should we clutter newer developers heads with shell syntax if we can avoid it? It's easier than ever to embed interpreters these days.
Now, being 27, I'd be tempted to at least argue for Perl as being much better than shell, and the cadillac of quick and dirty, but I just don't think newer devs bother with it. So, screw it. Harness py, rb, or js, and if you want to handle the cross platform issue, just build a library of routines that would be commonly used for the tasks at hand. On *nix, perhaps they could just shell out to the appropriate utilities.
Re: Don't understand why people "like"/want to rely on shell syntaxpozorvlakJanuary 15 2011, 00:34:48 UTC
I agree with you about shell syntax: though I've written shell scripts, my "just rewrite the damn thing in Perl" threshold is deliberately low, and I have to look things up almost every time. But shell is at least better than shell + make, and shell is very good for one thing: running programs, which is something build scripts generally have to do a lot.
I have yet to be convinced on this either way, tbh.
All I could think while reading my bash book was, "Seriously, I have to know this ridiculous arcane syntax now? Ughhh." It's 2010. If anything, I've noticed a renaissance of newer developers finally breaking past old barriers, creating things like git/hg, GSD quite fast with python and ruby, etc. Languages people are very likely to know or have learned would be python, ruby, the C's, javascript, java, possibly some lisp variation. Why oh why should we clutter newer developers heads with shell syntax if we can avoid it? It's easier than ever to embed interpreters these days.
Now, being 27, I'd be tempted to at least argue for Perl as being much better than shell, and the cadillac of quick and dirty, but I just don't think newer devs bother with it. So, screw it. Harness py, rb, or js, and if you want to handle the cross platform issue, just build a library of routines that would be commonly used for the tasks at hand. On *nix, perhaps they could just shell out to the appropriate utilities.
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I have yet to be convinced on this either way, tbh.
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