Programmer Humor

And I thought I was the only one… for smaller bash scripts chatGPT/Deepseek does a good enough job at it. Though I still haven’t tried VScode’s copilot on bash scripts. I have only tried it wirh C code and it kiiiinda did an ass job at helping…

When I was finishing of my degree at Uni I actually spent a couple of months as an auxiliary teacher giving professional training in Unix, which included teaching people shell script.

Nowadays (granted, almost 3 decades later), I remember almost nothing of shell scripting, even though I've stayed on the Technical Career Track doing mostly Programming since.

So that joke is very much me irl.

That's why I use nushell. Very convenient for writing scripts that you can understand. Obviously, it cannot beat Python in terms of prototyping, but at least I don't have to relearn it everytime.

There's always the old piece of wisdom from the Unix jungle: "If you write a complex shellscript, sooner or later you'll wish you wrote it in a real programming language."

I wrote a huge PowerShell script over the past few years. I was like "Ooh, guess this is a resume item if anyone asks me if I know PowerShell." ...around the beginning of the year I rewrote the bloody thing in Python and I have zero regrets. It's no longer a Big Mush of Stuff That Does a Thing. It's got object orientation now. Design patterns. Things in independent units. Shit like that.

Wait im not the only one? I think i relearned bash more times than i can remember.

It seems like it does stuff differently for the sake of it being different.

Clearly you don't write enough bash scripts.

I don't normally say this, but the AI tools I've used to help me write bash were pretty much spot on.

Knowing that there is still a bash script i wrote around 5 years ago still running the entirety of my high scool lab makes me sorry for the poor bastard that will need to fix those hieroglyphs as soon as some package breaks the script. I hate that i used bash, but it was the easiest option at the time on that desolate server.

So true. Every time I have to look up how to write a bash for loop. Where does the semicolon go? Where is the newline? Is it terminated with done? Or with end? The worst part with bash is that when you do it wrong, most of the time there is no error but something completely wrong happens.

Maybe applies more to regex, the write only language.

Today I tried to write bash (I think)

I grabbed a bunch of commands, slapped a bunch of "&&" to string them together and saved them to a .sh file.

It didn't work as expected and I did not, at all, look at any documentation during the process. (This is obviously on me, I'll try harder next time)