zlacker

Was Perl one of your first languages by any chance? I freely admit that I've only been poking at it for a few months; maybe by this time next year, I'll be boggled at the comment I left, like it was written by a different person.

> in between “bash script” and “real developer”.

One of my coworkers gave me some great perspective by saying, "at least it's not written in Bash!"

>>pavel_+(OP)
Yep, first language I learned. And since I was somewhat early to the Internet thing, I found IRC when I was about 14 years old and actually learned from a lot of the folks who have authored books on Perl or are at least (were) well known in the community.

It certainly was the major factor in how I connected the dots!

Haven’t really thought about it until now, but I suppose having Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz telling you to RTFM guides your early development in a certain manner.

I certainly have never considered myself a developer or programmer though. I can pick up enough syntax to get a quick hack done or start a MVP to demo my ideas, but I leave the “big boy” dev stuff to the professionals who can run circles around me.

>>phil21+M3
Not the person you replied to, but I thought the same thing. Perl was my first as well, and it certainly shaped the way I think about coding. It made Python feel too rigid and Ruby feel familiar. There's something to be said for the restrictions of an environment when you're learning how to operate in a domain that seems to shape future thinking.

I'm sure there are people who started in a language and later found something that made more sense. I'm just reflecting on what I've found in my experience.

>>pavel_+(OP)
> One of my coworkers gave me some great perspective by saying, "at least it's not written in Bash!"

I wish bash was the thing that was dying. As an industry, we need to make better choices.

>>asa400+p4
There’s nothing that can replace bash for what it does. People have been trying for decades. You’ll be happier if you accept that bash can and will happily coexist with anything and everything else, which is exactly why it will never go away.

>>skywho+v7
CLI usage revolves around text and bash is a meta layer above that. Given curl, jq, and awk, you can create a quick MVP client for almost any api. Doing the same in Python and Go is much more involved.

>>alsetm+d4
> There's something to be said for the restrictions of an environment when you're learning how to operate in a domain that seems to shape future thinking.

When at University the academic running the programming language course was adamant the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to programming language. ie language influences the way you think.

>>skywho+v7
>it will never go away

Chet Ramey became the primary maintainer of Bash in the early 1990s and is the sole author of every bash update (and Readline) since then. That would be an enormous task for a team of 100, no less a team of one.

I've become quite a fan (after struggling mightily with its seemingly millions of quirks.

>>Andrew+ch
I only recently learned about this, maybe a month ago. It made a lot of sense to me.

>>Andrew+ch
Seems somewhat related to Iverson's 1979 Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a Tool of Thought" (https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p...)(>>25249563 )

>>asa400+p4
Indeed. If I had to download and install bash … I wouldn’t!

I write bash scripts only because I can rely on it being there.