Why questions don't get answered, or "No, I've already RTFM, tell me the answer!"

John Summerfied debian at herakles.homelinux.org
Sat Dec 31 00:36:30 UTC 2005


Mike McCarty wrote:
> John Summerfied wrote:
> 
>> Mike McCarty wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Which is why, my friends, when I need a quickie one-off I
>>> *never* write a script. My longest scripts are no more than
>>> 20 lines or so. As soon as I need an "if" I switch to C
>>> and write in a language which is documented, understandable, and
>>> portable between systems.
>>>
>>> When I left the IBM mainframe world in 1981 I left JCL behind,
>>
>>
>> You could have been using Jol, which is much nicer.
>>
>> In the early 70s I wrote a set of assembler macros to generate JCL 
>> (similar to sysgen). Way better than catalogued procedures.
>>
>> My boss thought it a great joke when I submitted a job that submitted 
>> 50 or so jobs to copy tapes, then went off to college. It seems the 
>> computer centre staff got excited at having to do some work, and he 
>> took the call.
>>
>> You could also have bene using TSO command procedures. Note to others; 
>> imagine JCL as assembler-like, and TSO (with MVS, before MVS was 
>> different) command procedures as akin to a well-structured 
>> third-generation language compled with do/end blocks. Statements 
>> looked like this:
>> allocate file(fred) dataset(good.stuff) new -
>>    space (1000 100) block(4096) round
>>
>>
>>> and have never looked back. Writing long involved scripts is
>>> a throw-back to the Jurassic age. Join the 21st Century and
>>> abandon shell scripts.
>>>
>>> Just my $0.02 worth.
>>
>>
>> Way overpriced.
>>
>> How many lines of C is this worth:
>> for f in $(find unix/ common/ -type f -name \*.h -o -name \*.cxx  \
>> |xargs grep -lw secTypeVncAuth); do vim -c /secTypeVncAuth $f; done
> 
> 
> I have no idea, since it is essentially incomprensible goop.

Ah, there's your real problem: you no spika da language!

I'd not expect anyone who's made an effort to learn about the shell, 
simple scripting, and the standard *x commandline utilities to have a 
problem with it.

> 
>> That's the sort of thing I type at the commandline.
> 
> 
> Well, I don't want to waste the brain cells.
> 
>> How long would this take in C?
> 
> 
> Nobody would claim that all programming languages are equally
> suited to all tasks.
> 
> [rest of horrible example cut as unworthy of reasonable
> individual line by line comment]
> 
> I'd be ashamed if my C code were so incomprehensible and
> poorly documented.
> 
> We obviously have different ideas about what good programming
> really means. To almost quote Hoare: There are two ways to
> write programs. One can make them so simple that there
> obviously are no defects, or one can make them so complicated
> that there are no obvious defects. The former is much more
> difficult.

and nobody does the latter.

If you don't understand the language, you're not qualified to judge the 
quality or qualities of the code.

I grant you the regular expressions in the second can be a little 
daunting, but the shell script isn't the place to document how regular 
expressions work, and of you know how they work then understanding those 
isn't difficult.

Expecting annotations in such a script is like expecting a French poet 
to provide English annotations.





-- 

Cheers
John

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