[stanleydrew]

> I've experienced many times how highly skilled software engineers groan and sweat when they encounter shell scripts. I don't understand why, but it seems like people with a CS background are never really taught shell scripts and have come to irrationally fear them. It's sort of taboo.

It's not a lack of being "taught" shell scripts. It's the fact that shell programming constructs aren't well documented, your "standard library" is basically dependent on whatever binaries happen to be available on the filesystem, error handling is almost non-existent, etc.

It's very easy to write a bad shell script that "solves" a problem as long as a bunch of assumptions aren't violated. In my experience, senior software engineers are extremely averse to hidden assumptions and very concerned with reliability of the systems they build.

[pixl97]

Yea... "Well the script works fine in MY SYSTEM" was the most common issue with said scripts. Running across different versions of Linux was fraught with issues, much less any other operating system that could execute a shell script.

Of course this can happen with any language, especially as it ages and adds complexity.