links: Chronological entries

Link: Csh Programming Considered Harmful

Tom Christiansen's Csh Programming Considered Harmful used to be posted to various Usenet comp.unix groups, nigh on ten years ago or so. I consider it sort of a pity that it isn't still being posted, because every so often someone still decides that writing shell scripts in csh would be a good idea.

Some of the problems Christiansen identified have since been fixed by modern versions of tcsh, but not all of them.

(The article can also serve as an interesting catalog of sh programming tricks.)

Link: When the "best tool for the job"... isn't.

When the "best tool for the job" isn't argues that what we might think is the best tool for the job isn't. (I'm not going to mangle its ideas by trying to summarize it more than that.)

This is an issue that I sometimes feel moderately acutely, since I use X Windows in preference to something like OS X, while the general view is that Apples are the machines for people who want both Unix and a decent user experience (and there's a certain population that questions the sanity and wisdom of Unix people who aren't interested in that migration).

(From the Voidspace Techie Blog, via Planet Python.)