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Shell programmingShell programmingPosted Dec 9, 2012 17:44 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: Shell programming by davidescott Parent article: Quotes of the week
Hm. I hate to point it out, but your 'easy to read' Ruby one-liner was and remains utterly incomprehensible to me, full of thoroughly opaque punctuation, probably just as incomprehensible as the shell equivalent was to you: the presence of the occasional comprehensible word does not help much. The last time I saw that much nested foo().bar().baz().quux() was when building menus using Borland's Turbo Vision library. It is very much not intrinsically easier to follow than pipelines: at least with pipelines you know that what is being transported is text with a print syntax that you can easily examine, rather than some intricate datatype which you have to look up the various functions to figure out.
Your entire argument boils down to 'things that are familiar to me are intrinsically easier to read for everyone than things that are not familiar to me', which is not at all valid.
I'd agree that for larger programs, the shell is hardly ideal: datatyping is worthwhile -- but for quick one-liners to answer quick questions, it's exactly as valid as a bunch of other vaguely-scripty languages. Ruby is not magically better just because you know it better than the shell (and your claim that more people know Ruby than know the shell is unsupported, and to me sounds dubious in the extreme).
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Shell programming Posted Dec 9, 2012 19:01 UTC (Sun) by davidescott (guest, #58580) [Link]
> Ruby is not magically better just because you know it better than the shell
Never wrote that. In fact wrote something much the opposite of that
> (and your claim that more people know Ruby than know the shell is unsupported, and to me sounds dubious in the extreme).
Never wrote that.
> but for quick one-liners to answer quick questions
Not what this discussion was about.
> Your entire argument boils down to 'things that are familiar to me are intrinsically easier to read for everyone than things that are not familiar to me', which is not at all valid.
Your entire argument seems to be based on making up stuff and attributing it to others. There seems little reason to respond.
Shell programming Posted Dec 9, 2012 23:20 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
No, it's based on not looking upthread to see who wrote what. Feel free to interpret 'you' as 'collective you' if you wish :)
Shell programming Posted Dec 10, 2012 0:12 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]
> Your entire argument boils down to 'things that are familiar to me are intrinsically easier to read for everyone than things that are not familiar to me', which is not at all valid.
Exactly.
But the point you make immediately above, which was essentially: debugging is easier because you can merely lop off the end of the pipeline and *look at the data on the terminal*, is the really important one to me.
The best language for anything is very often *the one your programmer understands best*, as that is the one in which s/he'll be most efffective.
Shell programming Posted Dec 18, 2012 12:25 UTC (Tue) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
I think this is the nub of it.
I write stuff in shell because I know how to. After many years I've learned how to deal with many of the horrible things that go wrong, and with a couple of hours of dicking about can usually get what I wanted.
As with others if I know there will be a lot of data manipulation then I'll use perl instead, and know just enough to do that. I avoid writing in python because I don't know how, and worse don't know how to fill in the gaps.
If I'd started writing python 20 years ago things might be different (and I might be more productive - I like shell but I'm not going to claim that it's a _nice_ language)
Shell programming Posted Dec 10, 2012 0:47 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
the pipe based approach has the wonderful property that it's trivial to truncate the 'program' at any point and see the output at that stage (with normal tools like head/less/wc/etc)
In fact, I normally build up the monster pipe shell programs iteratively this way, one chunk at a time.
Shell programming Posted Dec 10, 2012 2:17 UTC (Mon) by davidescott (guest, #58580) [Link]
> it's trivial to truncate the 'program' at any point and see the output at that stage
So will interactive ruby (or python for that matter).
> In fact, I normally build up the monster pipe shell programs iteratively this way, one chunk at a time.
Same way I write long ruby chains.
The only difference is that Ruby passes objects and shell passes text.
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