To be fair I've made a decent career spanning five calendar decades so far out of replacing the thing I started out doing with a shell script (in recent decades, more often Perl, then Python), so it's not the _worst_ job advice....

On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 9:01 AM Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> wrote:


Den tis 26 jan. 2021 kl 16:24 skrev Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>:


On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 5:23 AM Tyler Adams <coppero1237@gmail.com> wrote:
Looking at the 1978 list, the last one really stands out:

"Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task" -- The concept of unskilled help for a programming task...doesn't really exist in 2020. The only special case is doing unskilled labor yourself. What unskilled tasks did people used to do back in the day?

Tyler
I've often wondered if this is the source of the infamous putdown: When you operate in such or such manner, "you could/should be replaced with a shell script." 

The version I've heard is even "... a very small shell script".

Niklas
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