back on topic... Re: [OS:N:] bash intro for high school students?

Brian Wiese <bwiese@xxxxxxxxx> · Thu, 16 Jun 2005 21:01:26 -0400

Jeff Kinz wrote:

On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 08:33:48AM -0700, Jay Scherrer wrote:

Jeff,

I don't know why you are so adamant against Perl? 

Excuse me?  

Nice try Jay, but nowhere in this thread did I say I was 

"adamant against Perl"  If anything I have praised it highly.

(Re-writing history is a sleazy thing to do, please stop it.)

Per the praising Perl,
In this thread I have said these positive things about Perl:

"Perl (while wonderful) is not designed to be used interactively."
"while Perl one liners are wonderful things and can be very useful"
"Perl is wonderful."
"Perl one-liners are great,"
"(With all due respect to Dr Maher, because Perl is truly wonderful, no question)"

Thats is five separate statements all praising Perl. ( please remove
your head from whatever dark place it was stuck in. ;-)

Now - back to the point of the original thread, which you seem to have
forgotten:

"Why bash rather than ksh or Perl?"

High school students (and others) who are learning about *NIX should
use bash over ksh for reasons of availability and compatibility.

High school students (and others) who are learning about *NIX should
learn bash before learning Perl for reasons of ease of use, ease of

learning and higher utility, (eg , Perl is not a command shell) 

There is no question that in Unix the command line rules.

Then there is no point to talking about this further, right? (sigh)

But I was only pointing to the fact
that as you teach or show students a subject, Let's say shell scripting,
it might be a good idea to start at the beginning but also show how far

one can go. 

No, you didn't say that, you said:
"That being said, these are also the roots of Perl.
So starting with the basics (grep, awk, sed) is fundamental even
for .sh."

Which I had no argument with.

The issue we are addressing is that when I said:

Perl (while wonderful) is not designed to be used interactively.
You need one of the command shells for that.  One can try to use
Perl as a shell, but it quickly becomes apparent that the need to have
everything be a complete program is much more awkward than the
"command line" mode of the shells

You replied:

This is not true.

To which I responded pointedly, with examples showing how bash/sh
is easier to use (less awkward) than Perl.

To which you responded that I was adamant against Perl, which is utter
crap, and shows that you either lost track of the issue being discussed
or were just attempting a sleazy "smear the debater" technique implying
that I don't like Perl. ( I do like Perl((I like Python even better :-) ))

In your example you use "egrep -i "^it" < file | wc ", now
wouldn't it be great if you were to explain where "egrep" came from? And

what else "egrep" can do? 

Jay, when I teach shell scripting courses I do explain grep/egrep/fgrep
and many other commands etc ad nauseum, but it would hardly make sense
to include my entire course on shell scripting in this email thread, now
would it?

You see shell scripting is nothing more then

grouping predefined functions together. 

Really. Imagine what a shock that must be to me, someone who has been using
*NIX since 1981.   ;-)

I see Perl as a successful accumulation of
all of these languages or utilities. On one hand you have head and tail

and on the other you have Perl.  

Congratulations on your insight.  I see that you have read one of the
many historical explanations for how Perl evolved or came into being, the
best ones having been written by Larry Wall, the author of Perl.  ;-)

I'm done with this thread.

Please enjoy your scripting and Perl programming and all your other future

efforts.  

Jeff -- please reexamine your 20 line reply to the 4 lines Jay took to 

recommend Perl in minimal use, to complement an instruction in the Bash 

shell.

-----------(begin quote)-----------

My respected instructor, Dr. Tim Maher will be publishing a great book

from Manning called "Minimal Perl" <http://manning.com/Maher> .
Minimal Perl is an attempt to show readers the effectiveness of what

Perl can do with as little as one line of code. 

Jay, while Perl one liners are wonderful things and can be very useful,
they are not as "minimally useful" nor as easy to use nor as easy to

understand as bash/sh command lines. (With all due respect to 

Dr Maher, because Perl is truly wonderful, no question) 

For example, word count on a file: "wc file"

Perl, of course, can do this in one line as well.  

Is it as easy to understand?  No

Is it as easy to type?  No

Inside the Perl shell can you go back to that line and edit it to
something more complex, like count how many lines begin with "it"
something like this?:

egrep -i "^it" < file | wc 

No.

Perl is wonderful.  Perl one-liners are great, but Perl is not a shell.

It lacks the features which make command shells the best place to use 

*NIX from.

I challenge you to try to stop using your command shell.
For one hour do everything from within Perl, or with only Perl
one-liners, using none of the command shell features (like command line
editing).  See if you feel like you have been more or less productive.
-----------(end quote)-----------

I found your comments a bit harsh, childish (No, no, no...), and off topic.  I thought Jay put it quite nicely in asking "why are you so adamant against Perl?" -- to which you replied another near 50 lines (and quoted lines) again in what I felt to be a harsh, childish, and off topic manner by turning the thread into your own critical rant, with closing attempt to get "the last word in".

Please... Let's just all be considerate to choose our words carefully, and realize that criticism/sarcasm doesn't carry well in emails.  Now, does anyone want to address the original question (besides me)?

(quote) "What book or other resource would people recommend for introducing  

high school students to the bash shell?" (/quote)

--
bwiese[at]cotse.com | brianwiese.net | 402.297.9392
"What we do in life echoes in eternity" - Gladiator

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