Re:Shell Style Guide
by zippitydoodah68 on Thursday May 17, 2018 @08:25AM
(#17090707)
You have deep technical ladders and they may make sense in a place like Google. Who knows. I've seen a couple young men I've mentored go to work at Google and don't hear anything negative from them.
Any code anywhere is worth being careful with and a shell script can be more dangerous than your average glue language (tcl,python,perl) script. I don't see why you need 1200 lines of shell script unless most of it is error handling and safe execution wrapping.
Funny, I've worked at Georgetown and my grandfather went to Stanford. I've written (over 20+ years) good and bad shell scripts. They get better the older I get and they also seem to be (mostly) less than 50 lines. I don't understand why people say these things about edu unless it's intended to awe the easily impressed. Smart is smart and well rounded is well rounded anywhere.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to show off. All I meant was that I had a pretty thorough mainstream CS education. If I didn't learn shell on the way then it's safe to assume most CS students these days don't either.
And maintaining a 1200 line shell script that can brick hardware in people's homes and disable their WiFi (or internet access altogether) is something to be careful with. There were five or so SWEs doing wifi-related things for Fiber (including me and one other person new to the team), and yes, he was the only one of us who knew shell well enough to reliably catch mistakes. He was a few years older than the rest of us, maybe that's why.
I have a BS in CS from Georgetown and a MS in CS from Stanford. I don't think I ever had a class at either school that required me to write a single conditional statement or loop in shell. I probably never would have picked it up at Google either if I hadn't joined an embedded team.