And life is open-book. If you generally know, but have to take a second to google syntax or something that's nbd imo. People use a lot of different languages.

If that’s what he was saying, OK-but the overall tone didn’t seem to imply that to me when I read it.

With any kind of systems level programming it’s very easy to write a working script that completely breaks when you move it, some assumption changes, or something gets updated a few months down the line. I think that’s where the real skill lies, not in knowing syntax. I can never remember syntax for anything I use.

Or instance we have a person who writes extremely pretty code, can kick the crap out of me in a competition between the gnarliest piped grep/sed/awk commands and can generally write prettier code than me. But her stuff never works after more than a month because she makes too many assumptions. Like grep’ing output for “fail” to determine if a test failed, smh

What do you do about that? Detect operating system version or w/e is relevant and send an alert and not run the script whenever it's not what you allow? I mean, I'm sure that could be good, but do you do it in practice?

What’s serious though? Can I change system setting like open file limits? User permissions? Write cron jobs?

There’s a bajillion things you can do on an operating system and thinking that bash scripts is some sort of gateway skill for all of them is silly.

And why not skip over basics? Skipping over basics of things it turns out you don’t need to understand is the foundation of computer science.

Again that’s not what i am actually saying.

I don’t really get what you’re saying then.

I don't know and certainly am not trying to present myself as anything other than a novice, but I've had to review a lot of code lately and here's the main things I notice people do that really sucks for me to try to maintain:

- Using a lot of external software dependencies, I avoid these unless absolutely necessary and stick to common commands that don't change much between unix based systems. For instance I never use find because its implementation and parameters change too much between mac/centOS for instance. I also don't use host or any of its associated commands for similar reasons. Stuff like that.

- Hardcoding file paths, or using a lot of relative file paths. This is the worst offense to me. I try to use absolute file paths for everything and to use locations where I know things will always be and keep it as simple/readable as possible. I see a lot of scripts that bounce between directories 40 times and you read it and you're like "where the **** am i right now?"

- Doing stuff that depends on output being formatted a certain way. Grepping output to determine some thing - I really hate this but sometimes it's unavoidable.

- hacky stuff like modifying source files with sed. **** that ****, just don't do it, there's almost always a better way.

- Piping 5+ things together to do some thing, completely unreadable and usually avoidable.


just a few things off the top of my head.

im not saying bash is some gateway to understanding linux. I'm saying if you understand linux you can write bash. That's all

If you understand one part or a subset of Linux, sure I guess I agree with your comment. But it’s an operating system and so pretty complex. You can have only a very simple understanding of command line functionality and commands and still understand other very complex parts.

Writing a language like react is more like UX for developers than an exercise in bleeding edge engineering. And it's definitely not something that requires a super-broad full-stack skillset.

If you read Abramov's things he does know - it's obvious he's very UX focused. Writing a good framework has a lot more in common with UX than it does with writing an efficient algorithm imo. You need to be hyper-empathetic to your end users (in this case developers, and actual end users to a lesser degree) - which is a completely different skill than engineering, and one that often doesn't go hand in hand.

I mean, that's still a terrible stereotype, I had multiple great professors in college who I learned a lot about programming from.

I had pretty good teachers for my $13/credit hour programming classes at SF City College. Certainly can't complain.

Incidentally, one of the first programming books (C Primer Plus) I ever got happened to be written by a guy from College of Marin. It was a great book.

(for non-locals, that's a community college in Marin County)

I don't use Python quite enough, but some of you might find this cool/useful: Coconut, a superset of Python adding functional stuff to the language

Featuring things like:

(from what Python I do use, their lambda syntax does seem utterly horrible)

I took Java there - same price. Never did find out my grade.

I took C++ and Perl at CCSF.

Both colleges shared some of the same teachers with Berkeley Extension - which was like 10x more but probably still cheap by today's standards.

Wow I just got called in for a performance review, only positive feedback and they gave me a 20% raise and more stock, that starts like next week. I am blown away - I was gonna ask for 20% at the end of this quarter, and pray for 10%, but this works. I didn't even hint at it yet. That's really cool, I am so glad I chose this place, even though it's been kind of difficult.

Congrats jmakin! Keep doing awesome.

Nice. Congrats!

Congrats!

Nice job - sounds like taking the initiative on your process re-org thing really paid off.

angular>>

Good stuff jmakin!

Web components ftw! On pace to be standardized around 2030, implemented in browsers about 2047.