Obnoxious postings from Google Groups

[GangGreene]

On Tue, 06 Nov 2012 08:52:36 -0500, Roy Smith wrote:

[putolin]

> Programming languages are designed to write programs.  Not only will the
> code be {used, read, maintained} for a much longer period of time, it
> will be used by people other than the original author, and on inputs
> other than originally intended.  It needs to be more robust.
> 
> The problem is that shells got pressed into service as programming
> languages.  At that, they suck.  Sure, putting a few commands into a
> file for reuse was great.  Adding a few bells and whistles like
> variables and conditional execution added greatly to the power of the
> tool.  But, by the time we got to 100 (or 1000!) line shell scripts with
> functions, loops, arithmetic, etc, things had clearly gone off into the
> weeds.  It's just the wrong tool for that.


Really?

I have just finished a 251 line bash shell script that builds my linux 
distro from scratch.  It uses other bash shell scripts that have more 
lines per file/script and sources the individual package build bash 
scripts.  I used C for the package manager which is only non bash script 
part of the entire package management system.  The only thing I would 
like to see in bash is to be able to return a string from a function.