System administration with scsh (Scheme shell) | Hacker News Reader

System administration with scsh (Scheme shell)

theillien.com

48 pointsgnosis11 comments

Any reference to SCSH should make note of Olin Shiver's infamous acknowledgements page in the manual.

http://www.scsh.net/docu/html/man.html

The story goes: while Olin was working on his doctorate he had the idea to create an anti-acknowledgements page within his thesis. While the typical acknowledgements page covers those who gave lover and support during the author's effort. This page would be dedicated to everyone he got his degree despite of their efforts/encouragements. He, eventually, was talked out of this. Later, this idea re-emerged while at MIT's AI lab and ended up in the SCSH manual. It's definitely worth a read if you want a laugh.

I make fairly heavy use of scsh. At least half of the sysadmin scripts and utilities I've written over the past 5 years are scsh programs. However, it does have its problems:

http://www.lysium.de/blog/index.php?/archives/215-Why-I-dont...

Also, I wish it were still maintained.

Despite the problems, I love using it.

Thanks for the very informative article. It's sad that there's not enough interest in scsh for anyone to have bothered fixing these warts in 17 years.

Olin, Roderic, and myself are working on the next major release of scsh. This next version has things like 64-bit support, r6rs support, all done on top of scheme48 1.9. We hope to ship it in the next few months.

If you're interested in participating or testing, head on over to http://code.google.com/p/scsh/

In addition to updating scsh, we're also working on getting MIT Scheme's Edwin editor to run on top of it. Which is over at https://github.com/scheme/edwin48

>[Scheme] is a stripped-down version of Common Lisp.

>Using cdr on a list creates a temporary copy of the list in memory with the first item removed.

Argh, this is painful to read.

Considering that the author is in high school, I found the tutorial rather good. Perhaps if you sent your corrections and suggestions to the author, he would appreciate your insight and make the appropriate corrections.

>This example is a bit larger than the sh script, but it is >certainly more readable.

I tend to disagree with the author on this point.

this isn't system administration, its syntax puzzle play that just happens to be on a console

I miss Sys Admin magazine.

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