Comment by barumi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barumi | Hacker News Reader

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> I'm sorry to say to for me, shell scripting has lost. All my scripts are written in Python, which a thin shell script wrapper to launch it.

I've seen, and still see, plenty of Python scripts launched by a shell script.

9 out of 10 times, Python just causes more problems than it solves, and problems that are trivial to solve with plain old shell scripts.

The only reason Python "won" is because we see a constant inflow of rookie developers who so far did practically only used Python ever, and that's pretty much the only thing they know and the only tool of their trade. They see all problems as nails, and thus insist in using their little hammer all the time without even looking at the current infrastructure or even the toolbox.

I have seen shell scripts launch Python scripts. I have seen powershell scripts launch Python scripts. I have seen npm launch Python scripts. Hell, I have seen Python scripts launch Python scripts by firing up a Python interpreter as a child process.

Python did not won. Python outnumbered. It did so because people who don't know better happened to know Python.

Don't let that be the reason why you make terrible technical decisions.

This is ridiculous. Python won scripting because it offers a sane way to do sequential, shell-ish things, without having to wade through "man bash" or searching stack overflow for the umpteenth time about the syntax to do something that should be trivial but is anything but.

Saying that younger devs only know python is like a FORTRAN engineer in the 90s saying young devs only know java. No one needs to apologize for growing up learning better mature readable shit.

The number of gotchas and tricky nonsense in bash could (and probably does) fill books (array indexing, string comparison, quoting, toggling 'set -e', many more). I don't doubt that there are clever grey beards that are wizards that know the arcana. That doesn't mean arcane should be what you build an engineering culture around.

> This is ridiculous. Python won scripting because it offers a sane way to do sequential, shell-ish things, without having to wade through "man bash" or searching stack overflow for the umpteenth time about the syntax to do something that should be trivial but is anything but.

You've inadvertently supported exactly my point.

You just advocate for the lazy way out. You know Python, so that's what you use and nothing more. God forbid you check out a reference. I mean, your lazyness leads you to believe that having docs.python.com on speed dial for a dozen different major or backwards incompatible releases is ok, but oh God forbid you check up a single man page of a tool that exists since the beginning of time.

Ridiculous, and all of this just because you believe you know Python, and that's all you have to offer.

Shell scripts are standard, omnipresent, reliable, and readily available infrastructure. There's no way around it. There's no excuse, let alone laziness and refusal to learn, which in this field is outright incompetence. The only reason someone refuses to use shell scripts for this sort of job is dereliction of duty and outright incompetence, and that is not winning in anyone's books.

So you say we should choose the hard way, because the easy way is lazy?

Also, your point can be turned around - you could use python which produces readable and maintanable code, but instead you choose the easy, lazy way of using bash, which you already know really well.

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