The mark of an advanced shell scripter is knowing not to do advanced shell scripting.

(This statement primarily applies to existing stringly-typed scripting languages, which are nightmarish to maintain and debug. PowerShell, nushell, or similar solutions have a much higher complexity ceiling.)

▲ transpute 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

2025 update of this 2006 presentation has a better title, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43714928

  Seat Belts and Airbags for bash

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pragma_x 8 months ago | parent [-]

Thank you for linking this.

I really want to reach for that pun and suggest: "Seat Belts and Airbags for bash safety" as an even better title.

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pottmi 8 months ago | parent [-]

Are you bashing bash?

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pragma_x 8 months ago | parent [-]

All day, every day. And that's coming from someone that _likes_ working with it.

	▲	pottmi 8 months ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, despite having created that presentation and having given it 50 times if I were to do another IBM JCL to shell conversion I would convert to zsh.

▲ rascul 8 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Aren't TCL and Perl stringly-typed scripting languages?

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pjmlp 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

No for Perl, in Tcl kind of, it changed in Tcl 8, already long time ago.

http://www.ira.inaf.it/Computing/manuals/tcl/man-8.0/Changes...

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Philpax 8 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You won't catch me defending them ;)

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uh2010 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes - at least in Tcl, _everything_ is a string

	▲	pjmlp 8 months ago \| parent [-]
		Not everything, and this already changed a while back. > The core of the Tcl interpreter has been replaced with an on-the-fly compiler that translates Tcl scripts to byte codes; a new interpreter then executes the byte codes. In earlier versions of Tcl, strings were used as a universal representation; in Tcl 8.0 strings are replaced with Tcl_Obj structures ("objects") that can hold both a string value and an internal form such as a binary integer or compiled bytecodes. http://www.ira.inaf.it/Computing/manuals/tcl/man-8.0/Changes...

▲ jsbg 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

> This statement primarily applies to existing stringly-typed scripting languages

IMO it applies to all languages. Fancy language features usually make for poor maintainability, e.g. metaprogramming.