Comment by orphereus

2 days ago

I really hate bash because of its unreadable syntax, and this does not help it in any way.

We have some large bash scripts in my company, ~10,000 LOC spread across multiple files, all sourcing each other and what not. It is truly hard to read bash, which means it is truly hard to maintain bash, which means that when the one person knowing the bash scripts in your company goes away, you're in for some "fun".

My point is, these quirks are not useful, except for some bash enthusiasts.

2 comments

orphereus

Reply
wpm  1 day ago

Its not "unreadable" syntax, it's terse and unfamiliar. There are many languages with terse and unfamiliar syntax to me that I struggle to read, but only because I'm unfamiliar. In fact, most programming languages have unreadable syntax at first, save for maybe...AppleScript? Maybe Scratch. Even Python's famous readability isn't guaranteed, some of its functional programming facilities are just as arcane and unreadable as *sh.

I spend about 50% of time working time in the shell. I didn't find anything in TFA unreadable.