1 Nov
1998
1 Nov
'98
12:53 a.m.
Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
I'm a programmer who's currently stuck in a
sysadmin/netadmin role and for
the past two months I've done nothing but put out fires nearly every day
(and this is a network of Linux boxes---if you treat Linux as Unix, then it
may be slightly on topic 8-) what with problems with INND (almost 10 years
old) and Sendmail (15 years old and still a security nightmare [3]) and
poorly written, non-documented cryptic and convoluted shell scripts in Perl
[4]
[4] Which takes the worst aspects of Basic, C,
shell, awk, grep and
C++ with none of the good aspects. Blech. [5]
[5] IMNSHO 8-)
Oh, Perl is a good language, I have enormous respect for Larry Wall.
Remember that there has never been a language written in which it is
impossible to write bad programs. Admittedly I don't use it as much
as I should (it's too new), as a sysadmin type my main language is
still the Bourne shell and its descendants after all these years.
And even when I write scripts for ksh and bash, I try to stick to
the subset compatible with the original, since that way they'll run
on my Tandy 6000 and AT&T 7300s. (Oh, I do document even my simplest
scripts, since there are several that have been evolving for a decade
and a half, since my days as a Tandy tech support guy).
And I challenge you to find any "non-worst" aspects of awk. After
almost 16 years, I still can't use it without having the man page
immediately at hand.
--
Ward Griffiths <mailto:gram@cnct.com> <http://www.cnct.com/home/gram/>
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