The older setup, which is where I was until its last days, was an ICL system that was expanded at the end of its life to a whopping 48KB - yes, KB - of RAM.Īnd that kit ran all the systems, internal (payroll, accounting, etc., etc.) and external (sales etc.) for the largest car dealership in the UK.ġ28MB? 4MB? Even 1MB? That was an unimaginably insanely large amount of RAM!
PERL GREP DIRECTORY UPGRADE
That IBM kit was the heart of the super new expensive upgrade in 1980 that cost something like 5-10 million pounds iirc to build, including a brand new building to house it and a team of programmers. (And a bank of about 6-8 tape decks, each as tall as me, and two disk units, each the size of a washing machine, and so on.) My first encounter with IBM kit was a, er, darn I'm not sure cuz I'm getting old, but I think it was a 4300? Not big iron in some senses, but still with a box that was something like 6-8 feet long iirc and definitely several feet wide and high. Shades of the Monty Python sketch here, but the following is true. Just mind the exceptions and use exit codes. It's just procedural execution of (usually very efficient) binaries, akin to a jenkins script or gitlab pipeline. Sometimes that tool is a combination of unix utilities that you can put in a shell script for easier maintenance. IMO we should use the right tool for the job. It's a great learning experience and why I got into python and go. I replaced if statements with case because they turned out to be more performant.
PERL GREP DIRECTORY CODE
Or people who download and import pandas to grab the third field in a csv file.ĭuring the course of learning, I've naturally written code in bash that should have been written in another language. This results in weird behavior, such as writing a groovy (Java?) script for Jenkins to execute bazel in order to build a go binary that runs the very same commands in an exec.Command() construct. I don't understand why, but it seems like people with a CS background are never really taught shell scripts and have come to irrationally fear them.
PERL GREP DIRECTORY SOFTWARE
Would you rather maintain Knuth's solution or Mcllroy's?Īs a self-taught coder, I've experienced many times how highly skilled software engineers groan and sweat when they encounter shell scripts. The classic Knuth-Mcllroy bout comes to mind. But for most simple processing pipelines, Unix tools are perfectly capable and can be used to build maintainable solutions. No, you probably shouldn't abuse shell scripts to build a complex system, and beyond a certain level of complexity, a programming language is the better tool. Personally, I find solutions you refer to as "unmaintainable nightmare" to be simple and elegant, if used correctly.
It inspired many modern languages, and its impact is undeniable. To be clear, I'm a fan of Perl and think it has its place, especially in the era it came out. Rinse and repeat.īut occasionally Unix attracts users and programmers who reject this approach, and who prefer building a monolithic tool, or in the case of Larry Wall, new programming languages. For any problem that can't be solved this way you write another small tool using your programming language of choice. It's the classic Unix approach of building small tools that do one thing well, and composing them in novel ways to solve problems. Anything more complicated was written in C and called from one of these things.
Automation was glued together in one of these with a series of grep, awk, sed, ls, test, commands glued together.
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