Shell Script Best Practices, from a decade of scripting things

Re:Shell Script Best Practices, from a decade of scripting t... by heresie-dabord on Thursday October 27, 2022 @08:21AM (#33356461)

"Primitive" seems like the wrong word to apply. A modern Python programmer (a common example) might think that anything not OOP is archaic. But OOP is just one design pattern. And... it can easily lead to over-engineering and delight in the pattern per se.

Bash, awk, grep et alii don't do OOP. But they are close to the data and are powerful.

Compaints about the notation of these tools (e.g. "line noise") are becoming silly now that we've seen the appearance of some Powershell and Python statements. ^_^

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Re:Shell Script Best Practices, from a decade of scripting t... by HyperSane on Thursday October 27, 2022 @11:13AM (#33358767)

""Primitive" seems like the wrong word to apply"

Painful, ugly, unpleasant?

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Re:Shell Script Best Practices, from a decade of scripting t... by heresie-dabord on Friday October 28, 2022 @11:21AM (#33372518)

I guess you would admit that beauty is subjective. Beauty in tooling is an even more rarefied discussion.

Code that we might deem "beautiful" may not even compile. ^_^

Does the tool do what it needs to do without getting fussy, gobbling RAM, and requiring a small army of maintainers to feed the monster? There is most definitely a place in technology for that kind of sanity.

There is something to be said for a design that doesn't bring with it a brigade of Opinions-As-A-Service proponents.

Any non-trivial notation is going to require learning. There is absolute value in learning. I think of many flexible and effective notations in tooling that has literally been the foundation of modern computing.

Maybe we are in the age of the Mono-Notation Luxury Coder. ^_^

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Re:Shell Script Best Practices, from a decade of scripting t... by sargstuff on Friday October 28, 2022 @12:14PM (#33373416)

grep is a domain specific language.

Bash and gawk don't have direct in-language support for OOP, but can be used/abused to do things in an oop manner. aka without in-language support (abstractions/api), takes much more effort to do/understand OOP approach.

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