From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-06-10T11:35:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby's role in future operating systems

I pretty much gave up on shell scripting about a decade ago. I was so
used to real programming languages with real syntax that I only used
shell scripting for "quick and dirty hacks". As far as I'm concerned,
anything with a loop or an if-then-else in it is worthy of a real
programming language with a real syntax and semantics.

Shells were an improvement over JCL, to be sure. And the C shell was
better than the Bourne shell, KSH and Bash are better than the C shell,
in terms of programmability and readability.

But once Perl (4) came along, I tossed out "awk" and "sed" and even
"grep" for the most part. I still type stuff like

du -sm * | sort -k 1 -nr | more

and

emerge -puvDN world 2>&1 | tee world-update.log

at the command line, but if it's a *program*, it goes into a script with
comments and configuration management, etc., and it's written in Perl. I
fully intend to learn Ruby as a Perl replacement, but for now, the
neurons fire in Perl.

James Edward Gray II wrote:
> On Jun 9, 2006, at 9:51 AM, Kyrre Nygard wrote:
>
>> I keep thinking that if all the Bash scripts in FreeBSD instead were
>> to be
>> Ruby, things would take less code and perhaps even move faster.
>
> I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the value of shell scripting
> languages.  They target a different problem space:  gluing programs
> together.  It's easy to write shell scripts using redirection and
> pipes that would be significantly bigger when translated to Ruby.
>
> James Edward Gray II
>
>
>

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com