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Comment by packetlost

2 days ago

they're routinely very short, and the only non-obvious syntax for someone familiar with a C-like language is the ~ command and redirecting to stderr. They're pretty much always easier to read (and write) than bash scripts in general because of how little weird/surprising syntax there is. Not being a derivative of ALGOL has its perks.

Most scripts are write-once:read-never, especially if you actually implement -h/--help

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packetlost

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eddythompson80  2 days ago

> Most scripts are write-once:read-never, especially if you actually implement -h/--help

I guess the answer is always “it depends”, but that generally has never been my experience with most things. Are you over-engineering the shit out of every script to the degree the script itself is a Turing complete machine and with enough —-help flags anything is possible? Most 40+ year old Unix tools with a thousand flags have their limits and you have to script around them to achieve things you want.

In my experience, eventually a business need will arise that require you to change a script. Are your coworkers comfortable changing these scripts or are you in the mind set of “that’s a simple enough change, I’ll do it”

  • packetlost  2 days ago

    > Are you over-engineering the shit out of every script to the degree the script itself is a Turing complete machine and with enough —-help flags anything is possible?

    No. They're 30 line scripts with 0-5 or so flags. They mostly exist to remove choices from other utilities. Put another way: create named (and namespaced) abstractions by making choices and slapping a name on it. They're functions.

    > In my experience, eventually a business need will arise that require you to change a script. Are your coworkers comfortable changing these scripts or are you in the mind set of “that’s a simple enough change, I’ll do it”

    They're small enough that they can be ignored if they don't do exactly what you want. I'm fine changing them, but it's most likely they'd just get rewritten or bitrot after I'm gone.