[10165]

The author's first sentence regarding "novice" shell programmers I think may be applicable to the other submission about shell scripts currently on the front page.

For example, in C the idioms often combine several instructions into a single line, i.e., "nesting". Kernighan suggested nesting in an early C tutorial:

   while ( putchar( getchar( ) ) != '\0' )

In the shell maybe it is better to test each "expression" on a line by itself. Or maybe not. I do this anyway.

More often I see on the web that other shell scripters prefer to nest as many commands as they can, perhaps to reduce the number of lines.

For example,

    variable=$(command1 $(command2));

This could be alternatively expressed as something like

   variable1=$(command2);
   # can now test variable1 before proceeding to next line
   variable2=$(command1 $variable1);

The result of nesting is subshells and complexity that I am not sure reluctant, occasional shell scripters are prepared to think about.

And if I am not mistaken that was at least part of the problem that Jane Street had in the other submission.