Skip to main content

Great minds think alike…

… or, "using quotes by well-known people to put forward possibly unpopular points" ;P

Sometimes I have a fully formed opinion to write about; lots of times I don't, but I have an intuition of where I want to go. And those times seeing what some of the "greats" in the field think can be a bit of a beacon.


Shell scripting considered harmful:
"Can we cease behaving like we're still pounding keys on 110-baud
teletypes now? Some old-school Unix habits have persisted long past
the point that they're even remotely sane. Shell programming at any
volume above a few lines of throwaway code is one of them - it's
*nuts* and we should *stop doing it*." (Eric S. Raymond, https://lwn.net/Articles/527308/)
My version: "yes, learning Lua would have taken us some hours, but we would have probably avoided the weeks spent fighting the inconsistency madness across busybox's shell interpreters and awks and whatnot".



(There is enough of a heap of functional vs imperative/C(++) that I moved it into its own post: http://hmijailblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/towards-functional.html)



To be continued…

Comments