Another tool for updating /etc -- lua||other script language bikeshed

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday 24 March 2010 9:11:21 am Ivan Voras wrote:
> On 03/23/10 16:08, John Baldwin wrote:
> 
> [snip - looks like a good utility, will probably use it instead of 
> mergemaster if it gets committed, like the idea about automated updates]
> 
> > To that end, I wrote a new tool that I think does a decent job of solving
> > these goals.
> 
> Since the issue comes around very rarely, I assume there are not many 
> people who also get the shivers when they see a shell script (and then a 
> "posixy" /bin/sh shell script) more than a 100 lines long? :)
> 
> Wouldn't it be nice to have a "blessed" (i.e. present-in-base) script 
> language interpreter with a syntax that has evolved since the 1970-ies? 
> (with a side-glance to C that *has* evolved since the K&R style).

"You can write Fortran in any language."  

If there are specific things in specific scripts that are poorly commented or 
implemented then I would work on fixing those.  The same is true of the 
mountain of C code in the tree.  Rewriting them in a different language will 
not automatically make them any better.

"Whatever language you write in, your task as a programmer is to do the best 
you can with the tools at hand. A good programmer can overcome a poor language 
or a clumsy operating system, but even a great programming environment will 
not rescue a bad programmer."  (Kernighan and Pike)

-- 
John Baldwin