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From novice to master, and back again (2013)

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Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#31

Post by MobiusHorizons »

hcks wrote: post #17

This reminds me of an old joke I heard a while back, which is that the opposite of "it's like riding a bike" is "it's like the UNIX command line". No matter how many times you do it, you will have to re-learn it every single time.

I think what a lot of people don’t get about the Unix command line is that learning to use the tool is part of the experience. Sure I forget the precise flags to get various tools doing what I need, but browsing the man page and rediscovering the breadth of the tool is half the beauty.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#32

Post by okasaki »

vxNsr wrote: post #25
hcks wrote: post #17

This reminds me of an old joke I heard a while back, which is that the opposite of "it's like riding a bike" is "it's like the UNIX command line". No matter how many times you do it, you will have to re-learn it every single time.

This is why imo powershell (when done right) is more powerful than bash (no matter how correctly it’s done). Powershell cmdlet names are descriptive and generally make sense as do the parameter names, additionally the guidelines for how to make powershell commands forces a certain style that once you grok it makes sense for most powershell commands. If bash has something like that I’m still missing it. Obviously the…

The brevity is great when used interactively.

For scripting you can always use Python, which is lightyears ahead of PS.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#34

Post by hinkley »

bsedlm wrote: post #2

yes. I think most of us who programmed in the trenches are familiar with forgetting what we've done... the difference is that nothing I've ever worked on will ever be public or useful beyond a small private business which doesn't even exist anymore.

After a number of rounds of the game, “who wrote this garbage? I wrote this garbage” I began to recognize my own particular code writing style.

I still get nerdsniped though if certain people start copying my idioms and introduce bugs, because this looks like something I would write but didn’t.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#35

Post by belval »

focusedone wrote: post #16

Wow, epic! The most depressing thing is being presented with an issue and finding my name attached to a closed ticket from years before with no explanation of how I fixed it. Guess what, current me, you're going to learn this again from scratch because past me was in a hurry and couldn't be bothered to type out what he did. BSG - this has all happened before, and it will all happen again.

I go through the same thing but with a few "popular" GitHub issues. Every time I encounter those bugs I Google it and the first result in my comment on the issue that explains the workaround I used.

That's probably how early Alzheimer feels.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#36

Post by avg_dev »

vxNsr wrote: post #25
hcks wrote: post #17

This reminds me of an old joke I heard a while back, which is that the opposite of "it's like riding a bike" is "it's like the UNIX command line". No matter how many times you do it, you will have to re-learn it every single time.

This is why imo powershell (when done right) is more powerful than bash (no matter how correctly it’s done). Powershell cmdlet names are descriptive and generally make sense as do the parameter names, additionally the guidelines for how to make powershell commands forces a certain style that once you grok it makes sense for most powershell commands. If bash has something like that I’m still missing it. Obviously the…

I do feel like we are all a little beholden to bash and it is tiring. While I will put simple work into simple bash scripts I always use shellcheck and do ‘set -euo pipefail’. For the life of me I can’t remember what that is or why I need it, I just know that I do. (I’d be comfortable looking it up if I actually cared enough to.)

Anything more than trivial I do in a high level programming language like Go (previously I would use Ruby or Perl).

From everything I’ve seen PS is a nice direction to go in.

I wish there was a sudden upheaval and everybody used a shell that wasn’t so legacy-cruft-laden.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#38

Post by laumars »

naniwaduni wrote: post #8
czep wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of the people you've helped get their jobs done over the years. That's worth more than author credit in the colophon of a man page.

The man page has ... probably helped plenty of people get their jobs done over the years! edit: or the program the man page is documenting!

Your first point is fair too. Commands are useless if nobody documents their usage.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#39

Post by alex_smart »

hinkley wrote: post #28
hcks wrote: post #17

This reminds me of an old joke I heard a while back, which is that the opposite of "it's like riding a bike" is "it's like the UNIX command line". No matter how many times you do it, you will have to re-learn it every single time.

I get a little offended by people who think stackoverflow is a character flaw. I go there because it will tell me things like if you get the arguments to ‘dd’ wrong you’ll zero out the drive you were trying to back up. That the function breaks if you pass in null for the second parameter. Or that it simply doesn’t work properly.

I think that using dd is a character flaw.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#40

Post by BlakeCam »

When I began studying physics I felt like a clueless novice. All those equations looked like chicken-scratch on paper. And, "What's the difference between kinetic and potential energy?" And there were so many concepts to understand - forces, masses, fields, charges, and particles. And differential equations seemed incomprehensible. Now, after a few decades I've mastered most all of that. Yet, when I try to grasp the real basics, like "What is space-time?", "How does superposition lead to a single macroscopic universe?", "What is the Higgs field?", "How did this universe 'start'?", "What exactly is mass?", then I realize I'm really back at novice again. I know almost nothing.
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