Re: AppleScript and shell scripting
Re: AppleScript and shell scripting
- Subject: Re: AppleScript and shell scripting
- From: Bill Briggs <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:37:15 -0300
At 9:04 AM -0500 7/30/07, John C. Welch wrote:
>the environment for writing shell scripts is currently one step above hex
>switches on a front panel and smoke signals
That's a bit of a stretch. It's three levels above, at least.
First level above would be assembler, but then you have to worry about memory addresses - that is hard - and what's on the stack and where results go, depending on whether you have two or three operand instructions.
Second level would be C, where the compiler looks after the stack and the memory addressing, though you still have to allocate and deallocate it. And you have to understand pointers. Some find that hard.
Third level. Shell scripting is probably more or less here. You don't have the concerns about address space, CPU register status, and you don't have to worry about malloc.
I know you were just trying to be funny, but keep it real. Computer evolution involved the period when RAM was expensive. In those days the careless waste of space that would come with the overhead of many levels of abstraction from the hardware just wasn't possible. That's the environment C evolved in. If it was crap, people would not be programming in it. Fact is that the code is very portable and it's not likely to go away any time soon. You might not like it, but that's neither here nor there. I intrinsically balk at Java (internal loathing of virtual machines that add yet another level of abstraction and suck up hardware performance), but Java isn't going away because I don't like it. I don't like segment/offset memory address calculation either, but Apple switched to Intel and one day I'll probably own an Intel CPU-based Mac. I don't like a lot of other things about the Intel CPU internals, but they're not going away either.
I don't see any sign on the horizon that Shell scripting is going to evolve in a way that you would deem "user friendly", but personally, I don't see it as any more difficult than learning any other environment. They all take some work, they all require you to build on basics to achieve a level of competence, but there is a lot of transferred learning from one to the other, so each new one you learn is easier than the last. Sometimes being a card-carrying contrarian can impose a barrier for you that's just as big as the one imposed by the environment.
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