One would wish that this 20-year-old article were deserving of the tag [historical], but unfortunately I see csh “programming” in the wild to this day, probably because it was the standard login shell on many Solaris systems in the 90s.
They would be better off using tcl. And I don’t particularly like tcl, but it’s just quirky rather than broken. At least it has sane quoting and control flow.
Bashing PHP seems to be frowned upon lately, but I hope we can all agree that anyone subjecting themselves and others to csh programming would benefit from a decent bash.
True that! I’m always amazed when I join a company and find a colony of csh scripters. Almost inevitably some well meaning sysadmin, raised on pre-bash BSD has gotten them started, and they don’t know anything better.
This is happening less and less though, I think the market dominance Linux enjoys these days has made bash ubiquitous and csh less so.
I remember reading this not too long after it was released (I think was even referenced in O'Reilly’s UNIX Power Tools) but had forgotten it was written by Tom Christiansen, who was quite influential in Perl circles in the late 80s and 90s. A classic.
I am impressed that a 1995 article mentions Python. Back then I had no idea it existed. Not sure when I became aware actually, but probably well after v2.2, which came in 2001. I’m pretty sure the first Python I touched was at least v2.4.
Edit: removed some content that may not have been appropriate. Apologies.
Weird to think that a commercial C shell is still available and being sold today? I guess it wasn’t that unusual in the late 80s/early 90s on DOS, OS/2 and Windows. I remember using 4DOS (and later 4OS2 and 4NT) during that timeframe.
Way late to the game, but I had my own rant at a friend privately about csh, usually tcsh “programming” these days. Signal kept crashing trying to copy the text, so here is an image: with a little language but nothing as offensive as csh itself:
One would wish that this 20-year-old article were deserving of the tag [historical], but unfortunately I see csh “programming” in the wild to this day, probably because it was the standard login shell on many Solaris systems in the 90s.
They would be better off using tcl. And I don’t particularly like tcl, but it’s just quirky rather than broken. At least it has sane quoting and control flow.
I worked as a sub-sub contractor more than a decade ago and the contractor above used csh. I remember the shock to this day!
Bashing PHP seems to be frowned upon lately, but I hope we can all agree that anyone subjecting themselves and others to csh programming would benefit from a decent bash.
True that! I’m always amazed when I join a company and find a colony of csh scripters. Almost inevitably some well meaning sysadmin, raised on pre-bash BSD has gotten them started, and they don’t know anything better.
This is happening less and less though, I think the market dominance Linux enjoys these days has made bash ubiquitous and csh less so.
I remember reading this not too long after it was released (I think was even referenced in O'Reilly’s UNIX Power Tools) but had forgotten it was written by Tom Christiansen, who was quite influential in Perl circles in the late 80s and 90s. A classic.
I am impressed that a 1995 article mentions Python. Back then I had no idea it existed. Not sure when I became aware actually, but probably well after v2.2, which came in 2001. I’m pretty sure the first Python I touched was at least v2.4.
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That would seem to fit the code phrase “little toy non-UNIX systems”.
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Edit: removed some content that may not have been appropriate. Apologies.
Weird to think that a commercial C shell is still available and being sold today? I guess it wasn’t that unusual in the late 80s/early 90s on DOS, OS/2 and Windows. I remember using 4DOS (and later 4OS2 and 4NT) during that timeframe.
Thanks for the edits - I’m happy to see people were mindful of a stranger’s privacy, and I do think that’s the right thing to do.
(To anyone wondering, no, I didn’t tell anyone they had to.)
I am totally shocked that nobody has submitted this here yet. Given the recent renewed interest in shells, I thought folks might find it interesting.
Way late to the game, but I had my own rant at a friend privately about csh, usually tcsh “programming” these days. Signal kept crashing trying to copy the text, so here is an image: with a little language but nothing as offensive as csh itself:
https://ban.ai/_matrix/media/v1/download/m.trnsz.com/ebvCeQyMmUfysrPtvztVCAjY