Comment by chipsrafferty
1 year ago
I'd love to see a cost benefit analysis of the author's approach vs yours, which includes the time it took the author to create the scripts, remember/learn to use them/reference them when forgetting syntax, plus time spent migrating whenever changing systems.
Not all time is created equal. I’ll happily invest more time than I’ll ever get back in refining a script or vim config or whatever, so that later, when I’m busy and don’t have time to muck around, I can stay in the flow and not be annoyed by distractions.
Sometimes it's rather matter of sanity than time management. I once created systemd service which goes to company web page and downloads some files which I sometimes need. This script was pretty hacky, and writing it took me a lot of time - probably more than clicking manually on this page in the long run. But clicking it so annoying, that I feel it was totally worth.
why is this interesting to you? the whole point of doing all of this is to be more efficient in the long run. of course there is an initial setup cost and learning curve after which you will hopefully feel quite efficient with your development environment. you are making it sound like it is not worth the effort because you have to potentially spend time learning "it"? i do not believe that it takes long to "learning" it, but of course it can differ a lot from person to person. your remarks seem like non-issues to me.
It's interesting because there's a significant chance one wastes more time tinkering around with custom scripts than saving in the long run. See https://xkcd.com/1205/
For example. The "saves 5 seconds task that I do once a month" from the blog post. Hopefully the author did not spend more than 5 minutes writing said script and maintaining it, or they're losing time in the long run.
Maybe, but
1. even if it costs more time, it could also save more annoyance which could be a benefit
2. by publishing the scripts, anyone else who comes across them can use them and save time without the initial cost. similarly, making and sharing these can encourage others to share their own scripts, some of which the author could save time with
2 replies →
Sometimes, you explore to have ideas. By fixing a few problems like these, you learn about technologies that can help you in another situation.
Not all time is created equally though, so I disagree with that xkcd.
If something is time sensitive it is worth spending a disproportionate amount of time to speed things up at some later time. For example if you’re debugging something live, in a live presentation, working on something with a tight deadline etc.
Also you don’t necessarily know how often you’ll do something anyways.
3 replies →
I find that now with AI, you can make scripts very quickly, reducing the time to write them by a lot. There is still some time needed for prompting and testing but still.
One thing which is often ignored in these discussions is the experience you gain. The time you “wasted” on your previous scripts by taking longer to write them compounds in time saved in the future because you can now write more complex tasks faster.
1 reply →
Because some of them OP said they use a few times a year. This means they'll probably use it like 150 times in their life. If it saves a minute each time, but it takes 5 hours to create it and 5 hours to maintain it over the years, then it's not really a win.
> reference them when forgetting syntax
If you have to do that, the script needs improvement. Always add a `--help` which explains what it does and what arguments it takes.
If you write these sorts of things in Python, argparse is worth investigating: https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html - it's pretty easy to use, makes it easy to separate the command line handling from the rest of the code, and, importantly, will generate a --help page for you. And if you want something it can't do, you can still always write the code yourself!
I don’t like Python in general, but even so I’ll say that argparse is indeed very nice. When I was writing ruby, I always felt that OptionParser¹ wasn’t as good. Swift has Argument Parser², officially from Apple, which is quite featureful. For shell, I have a a couple of bespoke patterns I have been reusing in every script for many years.
¹ https://github.com/ruby/optparse
² https://github.com/apple/swift-argument-parser
2 replies →