people who are in computers and are dismissive of "scripting" are fools, change my mind - ThreadSky

davidgerard.co.uk • 34 days ago

people who are in computers and are dismissive of "scripting" are fools, change my mind

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It’s amazing how dismissive of “scripting” people can be until you save them hours of clicking around a week by pulling data down from an API endpoint with a few lines of whatever

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happybusman.bsky.social•34 days ago

Are we talking a dozen lines of Powershell, or 1300 lines of uncommented Perl?

davidgerard.co.uk•34 days ago

the context is the job that was previously called "sysadmin" and has various names now

happybusman.bsky.social•34 days ago

Oh, right. 1300 lines of uncommented bash/sed/awk then. Much better than Perl.

davidgerard.co.uk•34 days ago

excuse me that's 1287 lines of wonderfully formatted code and 13 inexplicable one-liner pipelines that do the actual work

crossslide.bsky.social•34 days ago

I used to joke that my approach to unfamiliar codebases is to look for The One Line of Code That Actually Does Something, but nobody seemed to like the hyperbole

kasperjanssens.bsky.social•34 days ago

I'll give it a go: scripting has the connotation of not being tested and if it works, fine, if it doesn't it can end up failing down the line. The point is of course that scripting shouldn't necessarily be without tests, especially not when it starts becoming load bearing. It just too often is.

davidgerard.co.uk•34 days ago

is this a real objection from out in the world or one you thought of just now?

kasperjanssens.bsky.social•34 days ago

Hmm, good question. When I talk to people about scripts, if somebody objects or opposes it, and you start drilling down into arguments, it usually boils down to being less well built, less well tested. Whether this is from out in the world, maybe, maybe not.

kasperjanssens.bsky.social•34 days ago

At the same time, if I would have 100 euros every time I had to run a bash script that did not even have shellcheck run on it once, I'd be retired by now.

fartmuncher69.bsky.social•34 days ago

If I do it through the UI then I can spend two days not doing tickets. If I use the API that management don't understand, It will be done in less than hour and I have to do more tickets. What are you stupid?

tomalak.bsky.social•34 days ago

Anything goes except Perl and PHP

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