Re: [PATCH] Improve "git grep" flags handling

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Sep 13, 2005, 17:51 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0509131044340.3351@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <200509131739.j8DHdQL1010615@laptop11.inf.utfsm.cl>

On Tue, 13 Sep 2005, Horst von Brand wrote:

> 
> Shouldn't shebang go /bin/bash, as the script uses bash-isms now?
> (For portability to non-enlightened systems the installation would have to
> locate bash too... and/or mention this in the INSTALL file)

Some bash installs only install in /bin/sh, so..

> Or perhaps redo the mess in Perl or some such?

Hey, the code isn't a mess. The fact that there are tons of different shells and they don't support it is the mess.

So we should strive for bash syntax to be so common that other shells follow suit ;)

I personally find perl to be a really bad language. It has more of a unified base (different versions, but at least not totally different and unrelated implementations), and it's clearly more powerful, but as a _language_ I don't understand how anybody can accept that crap.

The "there's more than one way to do something" slogan may be cute and sound good to people who are drawn to that thing, but it's actually bad. The language is designed to be write-only, and the "you can do it fifty different ways" is part of it (and line noise characters is another part of it).

So sh is actually often a much better language. Too bad some of the features end up being outside the standard language.

I know, I know, people will consider me crazy for saying that.

Oh, well. As long as all the _important_ stuff is in C, we're ok.

			Linus