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Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

> [shell] It becomes especially bad when we try to develop in it, as it’s not a full-fledged programming language.

Who the hell 'develops' in shell? It's a glue language, not a development language. I've never heard anyone say "We're a shell shop".

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It's a glue language, but it's still painful when you write a shell script.

I spent a year working on ~80k lines of bash. It was an interesting experience.

You must tell us more :-) For my anecdote, I know people who did 10k+ line final year university projects in AWK and Tcl respectively. The AWK one was a particular act of endurance.

Was the primary product in bash? Or were you working on glue?

You must have mastered the bizarreness of bash arrays by the end of that :)

The actual product was hosting, more or less, although with some additional constraints that meant more moving parts. The bash grew out of manual scripts to provide automation and a UI for support.

> You must have mastered the bizarreness of bash arrays by the end of that :)

I mastered a lot of the weird corners, though we mostly kept them out of the code. I've forgotten much since.

Story time. I'll go get the popcorn.

Please consider spending some time to write a comment here or a blog post on this experience! I would be very interested to read it.

just like you never hear a carpenter say they have a saw-and-hammer shop. languages are tools, not identities.

anyway, is something like [this] result of development or gluing things together?

[this] https://github.com/roman-neuhauser/haveopt/blob/master/s/hav...

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