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Comment by vlowther | Hacker News Reader

Bash, but...

> --show me its arrays

  declare -a

> Show me hashes.

  declare -A

> Show me sets.

See above

> Show me the basic building-block primitives of software,

  thing() {
     local localVar
     # Yes, it would be nice to have lexical scope as well as 
     # dynamic scope, but...
  }

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Sure. All of which are clunky, opaque, and harder to work with than any other language I have used in the last decade.

And besides: if I can install bash, I can install something specifically better for whatever I'm doing instead.

Speaking as an (ex- (sort of)) sysadmin,

"All of which are clunky, opaque, and harder to work with than any other language I have used in the last decade."

Wrong question. A better one: Is it more clunky, opaque, and harder to work with than every other language that's appeared in the last decade? Because no one seems to agree on what is specifically better.

I disagree that it is the wrong question. "Every other language" doesn't matter because I don't value homogeneity and I think that homogeneity of programming language is a fool's errand. I am comfortable shipping production code in most of the languages in current use; in my estimation, none of the major build systems out there are as opaque or difficult to use correctly as make/shell.

(And I am what a current sysadmin would be if we did not call ourselves "devops engineers" now.)

And you are definitely not a sysad or any sort of sysadmin. The core mission of a sysad is to build the best environment possible while restricting that environment.

You seem to be the sort of developer that developers love and the sort of sysadmin that gets fired in the first week Just my .02 after two and a half decades.

Not to say that you are entirely wrong or your approach doesn't have merit in the new world (especially SV). But it doesn't work for sysadmins and production environments anywhere but your bubble. Not yet.

Well, you're right, I'm not a sysadmin. I pervasively automate, which often sidelines sysadmins, when it doesn't make them redundant. I write code and I don't touch production machines except in extremity, neither of which apply to most (though by no means all) of the people I know who want to call themselves a sysadmin.

Anyway, the core mission of anybody touching the stack is to enable the business to achieve its goals. Nothing, and I mean nothing, more. "Restricting that environment" is appropriate in some environments, and a number of my clients bring me in to help with that. Facilitating developer velocity--and, yes, developers do tend to like me, because I'm good at this while achieving goals around security and uptime--is appropriate in, probably, more. Pays better, too, even if it shouldn't.

It's not that sysadmins cannot do the work you are rightfully proud of. If there are two basic things that differentiates your statements from those of a traditional sysadmin it is these.

1. Design. 2. Discipline.

Where these two values are dispensable long term devops and the new world shine through. I've worked in both worlds and the only mistake is assuming one size fits all.

In general you seem like an absurd sort of creature. Neither here nor there. Bragging about your facility and business velocity. Everything you claim to do sysadmins were doing in 98 and with equal velocity and adequate coverage.

There were guys like this that were there before and helped everyone along: https://www.computerhope.com/people/don_libes.htm

At the risk of being too "meta", although I agree with what I believe is your point about good sysadmins having been advancing automation (and otherwise keeping business needs in mind), I worry that you're distracting a reader from that point by what reads as an ad-hominem attack in your first sentence.

I'm still not certain what point you were trying to make with "neithere here nor there", however.

Clunky is subjective -- I think we can probably agree that there are clunkier, more opaque, and harder to work with constructs in programming than a slightly different syntax for array declaration.

What are these build systems where you need to install Bash? Bash 4 was released in 2009: it's been in every major Linux distribution for at least two major versions, ditto for FreeBSD... heck, even Solaris ships with it now.

You're right, there are clunkier, more opaque, and harder to work with constructs in programming. Like `sh` arguments. And like `sh` quotebarf.

And Busybox is commonplace. Systems that include Busybox usually do not include `bash`. And so, for my purposes, if I can specify `bash`, I can also specify, say, Ruby, which--while by no means perfect--makes life much, much easier.

Have you SEEN how Bash array indexing works? It’s not exactly user friendly. Same with Bash hashtables (which I don’t think are really hashtables).

I love Bash and use it way more often than I should, but Bash is not a friendly language. Mocking and stubbing functions is really hard to do, which makes tests awkward, even with BATS. And you need to watch the file descriptor to which text is sent to avoid things get globes unexpectedly. And you need to properly scope your vars to avoid unexpected collisions. And everything regarding sourcing and importing dependencies. Etc.

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