[kwlug-disc] fish vs bash: a progress bar from YSAP and some timing measurements

[Ron]

Khalid Baheyeldin wrote on 2025-08-25 13:20:

> This reminds me of an article 30 years ago titled:
> 
> Csh Programming Considered Harmful
> 
> https://harmful.cat-v.org/software/csh <https://harmful.cat-v.org/ 
> software/csh>

That was interesting (admittedly only read about first ½ of it).


Shout out to Tom Christiansen, his Programming Perl book (the Camel 
book) was one of the best I've ever read.


But, back to that link: he argues that csh is unsafe and Bourne shell is 
better.

I cannot argue either way on that but he makes a good case.


However, looking at the syntax, it all needs to be burned to the ground 
and replaced with something sensible, using things like "words" instead 
of punctuation.

Easier to read, write, and maintain.


It probably won't happen, but I'm encouraged when I see younger-ish 
people looking at some of the cruft we've grown up with and deciding to 
re-implement in a memory safe language and discarding some backwards 
compatibility.

I'm sure this is controversial, but I reject "it was hard for us and it 
should be hard for everyone, forever".


Also, never-ending backward compatibility has cost Microsoft huge 
amounts of pain.  Sometimes it's just better to start fresh - assuming 
competent execution.


Thanks for the link, Khalid!