[rawdisk]

2014. Has this been posted before?

Anyway, I strongly agree. And I think it takes balls to state this opinion because you will be opposed by so many.

I also think the Bourne shell, which accepts good ole text as input (as someone downthread points out), is my most powerful application. Among other things because it is everywhere, it's relatively small, fast, and seems to have an infinite lifetime; it appears forever protected from obsolescence. It's reliable.

Stating this opinion never fails to draw protest. It's just an opinion. Relax.

One time I stated it to what I thought was a sophisticated audience that I was sure could handle it. Somebody still went bananas, claiming that "make" could do everything the shell can do. I must be wrong but at the time I thought "Doesn't make just run the shell?"

There will always be people who are hell bent on arguing against plain text. And the Bourne shell. Why is anyone's guess.

Yet no matter how much internet commentators might complain, I doubt these two things are ever going to disappear. They might get buried beneath 20 layers of abstraction, but they will still be there.

Year after year, they just work. And for that I'm thankful.

[hardcoreluddite]

"Any one language cannot solve all the problems in the programming world and so it gets to the point where you either keep it simple and reasonably elegant, or you keep adding stuff. If you look at some of the modern desktop applications they have feature creep. They include every bell, knob and whistle you can imagine and finding your way around is impossible. So I decided that the shell had reached its limits within the design constraints that it originally had. I said ‘you know there’s not a whole lot to more I can do and still maintain some consistency and simplicity’. The things that people did to it after that were make it POSIX compliant and no doubt there were other things that have been added over time. But as a scripting language I thought it had reached the limit."

From an interview with Steve Bourne in 2009.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/279011/a-z_programmi...

[plonh]

Bash went too far though. For example the utter disaster that is arrays, that cause far more trouble than they help.

[chubot]

Yeah I also get a lot of bash hate. To me it is super reliable, stable, and applicable to so many problems.

Although I have to admit it's a little like C++ in that everyone has their own little dialect.

[rawdisk]

To be truthful I was not referring to Bash. ;)

Bash is much larger and more complex than the shell I use.

[thegeomaster]

I have to take a moment to thoroughly agree with you on the shell sentiment, although it's not quite on topic. My zsh has always been my most reliable and used tool. Almost every piece of software I've ever used has caused me some headache---GNOME, Firefox, even vim, you name it. zsh never froze, or screwed up my work due to a bug, or anything like that. It always follows what I tell it to do with almost annoying diligence, and if I don't get the result I wanted, I know it's my fault. I've never liked using graphical file managers or, God forbid, some graphical renaming tool, to name an example off the top of my head. I feel immense power when I'm at my shell, because whenever I want to manipulate stuff---from the directory structure, to chaining some commands together to achieve a task, convert audio between formats, getting some quick info out of big files, etc., I always do it using the shell (well, and also the coreutils, sed, awk and others, but I believe my point stands). I know it's a basic thing that all people using Unix systems do and don't think much about it, but the amount of complex things it can do while staying so minimalist sometimes blows my mind. To me, the simple yet powerful text interface feels almost Zen. And although many shells have come and passed, each with its own quirks and weirdness, the underlying principles have barely changed. It's just that perfect. So here's one for the shell: the quiet hero of Unix :)

[lstamour]

Yes, it was posted before -- I remembered reading it then. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8451271