Re: new sysinstall

[Bill Huey (hui) <billh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Aug 31, 2003 at 07:38:11PM -0500, Chris Pressey wrote:
> Or maybe someone could just start me off with why sh + C isn't good
> enough.  Sure, maintainability is an admirable goal, but in my
> experience, there's no language that automatically grants you that.  I'd
> much rather work on someone else's well-thought-out, well-commented,
> well-written sh script, than their poorly-thought-out, poorly-commented,
> poorly-written Perl/Python/Ruby/Tcl/PHP program.  *Especially* if it's
> not "really" Perl/Python/etc, but a crippled fork with its own quirks.

With OOP languages you really have to look at flexibility and expressibility
as the core drive for using a system like that. Both sh+c aren't terribly
robust, flexible, easily debuggable enviroments like style Python systems.
For simple things something like sh and other low level tools are decent
for the job. But if you're trying to do something more intelligent, say
with XML parsing, etc... that can get quite complicate and it's good to
have solid programming abstraction to be able to express those things in
a direct fashion.

Tons of things can be done with language environment like that, that are
impossible in other more primitive environments. But what needs to be
clarified is the extent and direction of the project first before any
set of tools can be prescribe for implementation. That's the real problem
here, not the choice of programming language.

bill