TL;DR
Windows' shell sucks so people write tools. Tools are fun to use.
Linux's shell is amazing so people write terrible bash scripts ...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Can't agree more.
Bless you. Your last few sentences really sum up everything in computing.
Also, as a long time windows user by more or less accident, I'm just happy to see someone writing about it in a way that involves getting things done and shows usage without being fully in the MS stack. I've been doing it that way for years, but I always feel I'm in the minority.
This is what I needed today.
I disagree with the basic statement of the article, i.e. people are forced to implement tools on Windows therefore it's good that the windows shell sucks. No, it's not good, and no, they are not forced to do that. And they don't. I can't tell you how many hours I wasted on debugging organically grown Windows batch scripts. They have terrible syntax and non-intuitive rules that make your head spin. Bad bash scripts are at least understandable and much better to work with.
The biggest sin of
makeis that it is easy to misuse and that newer techniques of the language have not been popularized enough. A modern and well-written Makefile is nice to work with, but they are few and far between. There are tasks (not only building software) that are very easy to express in make, where a dependency graph with processing is needed. For example, in rpclib I usemaketo build the documentation: one target calls doxygen, another calls and xslt script that amalgamates the XML output from doxygen, yet another takes that xml and processes it, etc. Changes will only re-run stuff that has to run again. I would have a hard time of implementing that in Python.But: I do agree that shell scripts (be it windows batch or bash) are not a good fit for many workloads, apart from really small ones. Python is a good choice for replacing them, but this is not because the windows shell sucks.
No one has ever written a quick hack in Python or C! Or VBScript running with WSH!
There are so many things I disagree with in this article, but also, I think it needs to try and make a single argument, or at least maintain a theme, rather than a collection of unrelated thoughts with a sort-of-unrelated title.
It is so much easier for me to write one quick hack in Python than in bash. It has everything to manipulate files and other basic actions and is easily readable.
The bash syntax is, while powerful, really not human-friendly. It looks almost nothing like a traditional programming language.
Dumb question, I'm sure, but with whizzy IDEs (VS, Eclipse, ...), how does one do an automated integration build (daily on schedule, or on-checkin)?
Not a fan of make, but I do like command-line build tools.
For Visual Studio, I suspect you'd use MSBuild. From what I understand, it's a command line utility for making builds.
Can't agree more. And for windows users/developers etc... take some time to learn POSH (a.k.a. PowerShell). It will take some time to learn but is's awfully good IMHO.
Agreed. A very modern and practical shell
I've not seen a weirdest argument to defend a crapy tool xDD. But at least i agree with the conclusion.
Those tools will forever be foreigners in the server space. I even prefer Mac people. At least they are posix.