Straightforward, really. Consider Bash.
Now wash your brain out with … well, SOAP isn’t that much better.
All this wizardry you can accomplish on the command line? Wonderful, isn’t it? Makes you feel like the Master of the Universe …
... Right up to the point where you actually start to write a program to do the same thing.
That’s the dirty little secret of the CLI boys. They just cannot program. Even back in the ’90s, you could implement something in, say, C at least as fast (and rather more maintainably) as you could in a shell script.
And then we moved into the Noughties.
And now we are a decade further on, and we have this ancient creaking thing called Java which still does a better job. And we have Perl (if you insist) and Python and Ruby and Scala and if you want strong typing we have C# and you can even play around with functional programming if you want.
The point about all of these languages, in this context, is three-fold.
Every single one is backed with a vast assortment of useful libraries that save you from re-inventing the wheel.
Every single one has at least one underlying virtual machine, which makes it portable and which, in fact, enforces parseability.[1]
And they all have nice’n'easy interfaces either to a database of choice (via things like ODBC) or a GUI of choice (via things like Qt or Wx or whatever).
Alternatively, you can just stick with what little you understand. The CLI!
You know it makes sense.
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[1] Edit: Well, in fact, that isn’t remotely true of Perl. There’s always got to be one, hasn’t there?
Comments
ODBC makes me cry :( Especially when the underlying ODBC driver is half backed (yes, f*ck MySQL and PostgreSQL right in the ears!).
Added CLIisAPI™, since it seemed appropriate.
@GESH:
If ODBC makes you cry (which is fair 'nough), consider what a pig’s ear would result of Bash trying to bake something like it in.
The words “escape characters” spring to mind.
ImASysAdmin might fit in, since all the supposed sysadmins for “major Forbes 500” corporations claim they need it for securing the network and such.
Since most here refer to pragmatism as a guiding virtue, these “rants” about CLI seem to contradict that same virtue. If you use bash beyond its proper use, yes, I agree you would do better by choosing possibly a high-level programming language. It all become even more irrational when “Related Trademarks” links to pure anti-CLI opinions, probably with the purpose of eradicating not only *nix-shells but also CMD and PowerShell.
Sure some might use a CLI as an attempt to brag about their skills, but mostly it’s simply a question about convenience, or call it laziness if you wish. Why on earth would you bother to make something simple complicated if a one liner does the job? With aliases in bashrc you probably get a collection of your most frequently used simple bash-scripts, and you probably also choose to copy them between machines, meaning you never have to write these scripts more than once. By the way the anti-CLI guys must despise SSH as well, do they?
On top of that some languages interpret CLI arguments as strings, so what’s the big deal if you fall back to bash while using program languages for specific tasks? Maybe you don’t really on using bash for anything particular than to execute scripts and programs written in proper programming languages?
A nail gun out guns a simple hammer, but to always insist on using a nail gun would be plain stupid and extremely impractical.
Nope, I use bash all the time.
I just don’t use it for programming tasks. This TM is specifically dedicated to the people who do, and there’s plenty of them still out there. 50% of my interviews still ask dumb questions requiring intimate off-the-top-of-your-head knowledge of things like cut and sort and uniq.
And the related TMs? They’re related. I don’t quality-screen them first to make sure they’re an exact replica of what I’m trying to say, for goodness’ sake.
All I’m trying to say is that this “fix it yourself” attitude almost always ends up on the command line, using bash. Because, let’s face it, who wants to “fix” ten thousand lines of twenty year old C? I can, but I don’t.
OK, that make much more sense to me. I suspect though that some here will read more into it than you meant.
“OK, that make much more sense to me. I suspect though that some here will read more into it than you meant.”
I doubt it. After all, not everyone here is that goofball KimTjik from Piestar.
@DrLoser
I agree with you fully, I just have some bad memories with ODBC.
And wouldn’t you know, I’ve just had to use grep, cut, and uniq to identify all the missing libraries in the overnight build.
I am become Loon.
http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2008/11/overheard.html
I just find it hilarious that you guys seem to have a deep hatred for POSIX CLI. Nobody is forcing you to use it. Why don’t you change your login shell to /usr/bin/env python and STFU?
Why can’t splatnices present a sensible default?
And, of course, let’s not forget that this isn’t a TM about Bash being crap, it’s a TM about people abusing the command line for tasks that are easier to accomplish with an actual program.
How can Adam forget something he has never taken in?
It’s the Eternal Moonshine of the Spotty Mind all over again…
Dr. L., please don’t denigrate moonshine by comparing it to the“illumination” that seeps from Adam.
A lump of coal at the bottom of a sealed up mine is more illuminating.
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