letusnot

This is the middle ground that WP Engine is in and they are minting money.

I recently started working a more devops role at a company (I've been a ruby dev for most of my career) and one of the things that I've noticed is how _insane_ scripting by ops people is. I'll start poking around a build pipeline and there will all sorts of tortured usages of sed and jq and bash and coreutils to get things done that would be _really_ simple in ruby. I routinely see people using wget and curl in the same script. I'll see people pipe sed text replacement into perl for more text replacement. I'm constantly aware of ruby three liners that are fully portable, even to Windows, that could replace a dozen lines of potentially subtly buggy shell scripting.

And honestly I can't see any good argument for this patchwork approach to gluing things together. I guess some ops people might argue that you'd have to have ruby everywhere but the counter argument would be that we use docker images for everything and adding ruby as a dependency isn't any worse than all the insane dependency gymnastics it takes to get our node apps working.

And all of this applies equally for any language with a reasonable standard library (python, perl). I think people have weird feelings about using bash or make or whatever to accomplish things, like they are riding closer to the metal or that they are living some deeply pragmatic zen Unix philosophy, but mostly they are making an un-testable mess until it works once and then, if they are lucky, they don't have to touch it again.