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Comment by Brian_K_White | Hacker News Reader

Oh let me clear that up for you.

This article and this comment discussion assumes a certain familiarity with computers and system administration, which, to ask a question like that, you must not have.

So a bash script is this thing that's very functional, flexible, legible, can be written quickly and easily, can be maintained and updated quickly and easily, and is even portable across platforms, and it gives you all that without a teetering fragile tower of library and framework dependencies that most other automation systems rely on. Every system already has bash or some equivalent Bourne shell for free.

Assembly has none of those qualities.

Are there any other mysteries we can clear up? I mean we all had to start somewhere and "there are no stupid questions" right?

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> Oh let me clear that up for you.

> Are there any other mysteries we can clear up? I mean we all had to start somewhere and "there are no stupid questions" right?

I'm surprised at how big a jackass a single person can appear in such a concise response.

Every time a new technology shows up, there are lots of "Why not just use < insert old technology >?" The answer is obvious, and can be most highlighted by leaning harder into the absurdity of "Why not just use < insert old technology>?", which is, why does any technology exist beyond Assembly if all that's old is good enough?

But, given you can't behave like a grown up, I'd rather not continue this comment tree.

That’s just the thing. Bash isn’t old and therefore lacking in value. It’s not absurd either.

A lot of bash commands like sed automate editing config files that systems like ansible and docker rely on.

Since you haven’t really shared your experience with bash, assembly (or not), or what you prefer instead, it’s really hard to openly entertain viewpoints that aren’t your own when the other party isn’t demonstrating it As well.

I use bash, docker, Ansible or whatever else will do the job. I can orchestrate vms and also configure bare metal. I use public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds.

These could all be interesting things to mutually learn and talk about but maybe it’s more enjoyable for you to have others put in mental labour for you.

The one thing complex hosting experience gives you is not to discount any solution for fear of what others may think. It’s where the real world of scaling is.

Deciding on what’s best solely by what’s new, popular or social proof can leave a developer exposed where the rest of groupthink may be - often reinventing the wheels over and over in new languages to learn the fundamentals of why it will or will not work out in the end.

You asked a question. I answered the question. The answer was neither a lie nor in error.

If you want to remark that the answer was disingeuous without acknowleding the same about your own, then you are in no position to be talking about jackasses and growing up.

The thing about this answer is it requires learning a basic tech skill instead of trying to avoid it with a higher level tool right away like docker.

I’m a better user of docker because I know a little bit of bash. It’s not one or the other like so many decisions folks with could be made by social proof.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted, I keep in mind anyone who advises on cloud usage might only have cloud experience to begin with.

It’s not lost on me that while many jr devs are spending a ton of time putting together and making their stack work… others can just build and ship code.

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