For a while, there was a strong trend of "I want to do everything in one singular language". Your coding is in language XYZ. Your build tools will be configured/written in XYZ. Your UI frontend will be generated from XYZ. Everything will be defined in XYZ.
Shell is from a time when you had a huge selection of languages, each for different purposes, and you picked the right one for the job. For complex applications, you would have multiple languages working together.
People look at Bash and think, "I would never dare do $Task with that language!". And you'd be right, because you're thinking you only have one tool in the toolbox.
Bash syntax is the pinnacle of Chesterton's Fence. If you can't articulate why it was done that way, you have no right to remove it. Python would be an absolutely unusable shell language.
I didn't say that there wasn't a reason. I said it was absolute trash to use. It's so bad that the moment I need even the slightest bit of complexity, I will switch away from bash. Can't really say that for any other language.
It isn't quite that simple though - you're saying the standard is something like no danger of being a net welfare recipient. Apreche said he saw "no reason that becoming a citizen today should be any more difficult today than it was in the early 20th century".
Those are different. The standard of not being likely to be a welfare recipient is a much higher standard than what was around in the early 20th century. The US federal minimum wage came in in 1933 [0] for example following work that started in the 1910s. Ellis Island migration was completely finished fairly soon after that in the 1950s after what seems to be a wind-down period [1]. I don't know my US immigration history of when they started reviewing migration in relation to welfare but it'd be a complex question and it isn't obvious that the standards that were traditionally used on Ellis Island would even guarantee that the people migrating were skilled enough to be allowed to work in the modern era.
Yeeeaaaah, I dunno if you wanna go there while the US is investing $100B in state sponsored ethnic cleansing, terrorism, and concentration camps. Glass houses, stones, etc.
I'd replace "real conversation" with "community". And I think communities don't prohibit anonymity. I think the impossibility is really having a community with a very large active userbase. A macro version of Dunbar's number.
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
It is unfortunately very true. For about 20 years I moderated a very large forum. We tried so hard to be even handed it was somewhat comical, and then one day I decided to just clean house. Things improved remarkably after that but there were always new people willing to see how far they could bend the rules. It's interesting how you get these new accounts on HN that immediately start lawyering with the rule book in hand. There is no way that that is organic.
Dan & Tom are so incredibly restrained, I'd be much more of a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later type because the longer such behavior goes on the more people will believe it is acceptable.
Shell is from a time when you had a huge selection of languages, each for different purposes, and you picked the right one for the job. For complex applications, you would have multiple languages working together.
People look at Bash and think, "I would never dare do $Task with that language!". And you'd be right, because you're thinking you only have one tool in the toolbox.
reply