3 Jan
2023
3 Jan
'23
12:12 a.m.
On Mon, Jan 02, 2023 at 12:00:20PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
You are talking to a dude with 40+ years of Unix experience, supporting
commercial products most of that time. I didn't get "lucky at Russian
Roulette", I wrote scripts that were portable. I have 40 year old scripts
that _still_ work and they work on virtually every Unix ever built.
How do I know? I was a contractor for my first job, I got plopped down
in front of every random unix you could imagine and each time I polished
off the warts.
I spent decades supporting my own products on every flavor of Unix and
processors from Arm to System/360. Oh, and Windows XP and on and MacOS.
My scripts worked with /bin/sh being whatever it was.
It's interesting to me that other old timers, like Clem, are saying
exactly the same thing as I am. Are we all wrong?
> If it
ain't broke, don't fix it.
They were all broken. Badly. If your scripts worked, you got lucky at
Russian Roulette. No greater claim to robustness can be made.
POSIX shell conformance still proves challenging for vendors, but is an
immense improvement over the status quo ante.