[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Adam Thornton]

> On Jan 3, 2023, at 10:26 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> A few years ago, I was having lunch with some folks from the Go team
> and one of them remarked, "you shouldn't write a shell script that's
> longer than about 10 lines. Once you do, it's time to rewrite it in a
> real programming language." I was a bit taken aback, but they had a
> point. I'll note that Go standardized on using bash everywhere.


My number is larger than 10, but it's smaller than 100.

Lord knows I have plenty of things that started as a pipe and-or-for-loop at the command line, that became a shell script, that grew some arguments, that got beefier, and that I then rewrote in Perl or Python and cursed myself for not having done it that way from the start.

The RSP Notebook I mentioned on COFF is about to have its installer--which is a hodgepodge of shell scripts and Python scripts--rewritten as reasonable Python classes with typing and test cases and everything, because it's grown enough that it's hard to understand in its current form.

Adam