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Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix

rodrigoalvesvieira.com

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Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix

#81

Post by godbolev »

bane wrote: post #79

tl;dr - this does work to a point, but won't necessarily teach you idiomatic and community practices that come with experience, but it is surprisingly sticky I had the great pleasure, year ago in my undergrad Operating Systems class, for the class assignment to be "write an OS in Java"...which of course was handed out to a group of students who had never seen Java. By the end of the semester we had written the core g…

What is a non-lexical phrase extractor?

I googled it but it leads back to this page.

Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix

#84

Post by lloeki »

Someone wrote: post #65
kryptiskt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you get a better grounding in the Unix philosophy if you omit the command line switches and make small utilities to handle those cases, because as the paper said, cat -v is harmful ( http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf ).

The Unix philosophy is somewhat of a myth. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/man12.pdf shows that that same first edition already had a -t option on ls. Surely, that should have been some | sort, but AFAICT, they did not bother to write that until some later time.

Sticking to a philosophy like a zealot makes it a religion. Keeping it as a philosophy means it encourages a certain approach, not that it makes it an absolute unbreakable rule, plus it would only results in bikeshed/flamewar arguments.

as PEP20 says:

    Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
    Although practicality beats purity.

Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix

#85

Post by inkel »

guruparan18 wrote: post #73

Another good thing about learning UNIX (or using Linux) is the ability to write code snippets that could automate daily chores (you can do in Windows too, but I am not going to speak about it here). Some of the code I enjoyed writing and using is, code to remember directory paths I visited (I visit lot of them, and it is a pain to type lengthy ones). A wrapper for "ssh" to remember hosts and list them (again I had to…

I agree with you, having the ability to script everyday tasks is awesome, though however in the case of the ssh wrapper it might be a little overkill, given that you can achieve the same (and more) with a ssh_config file [1] [2]. I would particularly recommend the ControlMaster option.

[1] http://nerderati.com/2011/03/simplify-your-life-with-an-ssh-... [2] http://linux.die.net/man/5/ssh_config

Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix

#86

Post by omaranto »

eru wrote: post #74
michaelfeathers wrote: post #21

I write a unit testing framework in every new language I learn. I find it's a great workout because making it usable for yourself is immediately assessable, and it often forces you into deeper areas of the language, including reflection and meta-programming.

You might want to have a look at QuickCheck. Trying to port it's techniques to other languages will also give you some insight (and will result in valuable tools).

And make you miss the ability to overload functions just on return type. Same thing happens if you use Haskell's regex library or try t port monads to another language.

Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix

#88

Post by Someone »

lloeki wrote: post #84
Someone wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Unix philosophy is somewhat of a myth. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/man12.pdf shows that that same first edition already had a -t option on ls. Surely, that should have been some | sort, but AFAICT, they did not bother to write that until some later time.

Sticking to a philosophy like a zealot makes it a religion. Keeping it as a philosophy means it encourages a certain approach, not that it makes it an absolute unbreakable rule, plus it would only results in bikeshed/flamewar arguments. as PEP20 says: Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity.

I said "somewhat" for a reason, but I think there are just too many special cases to keep calling them exceptions. I use awk and sed, pipe things into bzip2, but I more often use tar with a z or j option to compress stuff an in a pipeline. We also do not have separate tools for parsing python/ruby/perl and executing it. If code reuse using pipes were successful, wouldn't we have a separate 'exec' tool that is backend to all scripting languages? Looking at gcc with its zillions of options, pipes sometimes look more like an implementation detail than as the primary way to compose tools.

Also, other kinds of reuse of the things mentioned as examples of the Unix philosophy are rare. What languages on your system use lex and yacc? 'but thise tools are outdated' is not a good revuttal; if they are, how has that come about? I think the Unix philosophy is perfect for prototyping, but 'real' stuff tends to need polish that 'the unix philosophy' cannot provide. As a final example, consider git. As I understand , it started life as a set of scripts, but eventually became a C program.

Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix

#89

Post by SoftwareMaven »

spullara wrote: post #20
intellegacy wrote: post #11

Can someone give a non-expert way of going about this learning method? For instance, what are your options on Windows or Mac? And are the languages you can do this with limited to Ruby, Python, or Javascript?

The point is to copy the commands, you can copy them on any operating system. It just happens that Mac & Linux have them built in while Windows doesn't. As for which languages, this actually seems like it would be useful for learning any language that has reasonable ways of interacting with IO streams. Off the top of my head: Ruby, Python, Javascript (node.js), Perl, Java, C#, Scala, Clojure, C, C++, Go, etc.

I think, almost by definition, for a language to have any interest, it must be able to deal with I/O streams. I can't think of a language that wouldn't work (I'd be very interested if somebody knows one and why it wouldn't work).

What the scripting languages give you is simplicity. No need to muss with compilers.

Re: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Unix

#90

Post by draegtun »

stevekemp wrote: post #70

A few years back I remember submitting the implementation of a couple of Unix tools in Perl. The idea was to implement as many of the standard tools as possible, in perl. The project seems to be sleeping, although there are many contributions: http://search.cpan.org/dist/ppt/

Blimey... I've completely forgotten about Perl Power Tools! Here's the project home page - http://ppt.sourceforge.net/
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