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by mattmanser
2723 days ago
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This sort of stuff isn't taught anywhere though, you have to either be shown it by someone else in a previous job, or have it annoy you enough to figure it out with some serious google fu (and the freedom to follow that path). It's an unknown unknown, a lot of programmers will simply not know you can use quick and dirty scripts to process data if you're only going to do it once. I work mainly in .Net and the similar problem I see is devs who don't even know that console apps exist, let alone how to make them, which simplifies prototyping new code immensely. |
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Sure it is taught. It's taught by some people ( including me - plug here for my Linux and Python courses, with testimonials: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/p/training.html ) in their Unix / Linux courses, as examples of how to really put the classic (and oft-quoted) Unix philosopy + command-line tools + shell scripting to good use, synergistically ("write small tools to do one job each, well, and connect them by pipelines and I/O redirection, etc. etc.").
It's not even rocket science; bread-and-butter EDP/IT folks (programmers and even operators) (not just clued-in software engineers in product companies) have been using such scripts for decades, routinely, without thinking they are doing anything great or out of the ordinary. (And similarly for other OSs, I'm sure, such as Rexx on some platforms. Not sure what was used on Windows before PowerShell, maybe Perl and/or one of the Unix toolkit clones like MKS Toolkit or Cygwin or UWin - apart from clunky batch file language and DOS/Windows command-line commands).
It's just that it is not so well known nowadays among the (often mainly JS-using) generation, who even write CLI apps in Node.
>It's an unknown unknown, a lot of programmers will simply not know you can use quick and dirty scripts to process data if you're only going to do it once.
It's their loss (and that of the industry), comes from not trying to learn about prior art.
There's even a name for it: NIH syndrome [1], and heck, even that is not new :) Dates from early IBM days or earlier ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here