Bistable multivibrator
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Tabs for AI indentation, spaces for AI alignment
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Absolutely. Take the reverence for “SysV” init* to the point where the init system has all but eclipsed the AT&T Unix release as the primary meaning of “System V”. The BSDs (at least the Net/Open branch, not sure about FreeBSD) adopted a simplified BSD init/rc model ages ago and Solaris switched to systemd-esque SMF with little uproar. Personally I even prefer SMF over its Linux equivalents, despite the cumbersome XML configuration.

    I somewhat understand the terminalchud mindset, a longing for a supposed simpler time where a nerd could keep a holistic grasp of one’s computing system in their head. Combine that with the tech industry’s pervasive male chauvinism and dogmatic adherence to a law of “simplify and reduce weight” (usually a useful rule of thumb) and you end up with terrible social circles making bad software believing they’re great on both fronts.

    * Rather, the Linux implementation of the concept


  • make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash

    Oh god, please no. I have PTSD from 50-line Python scripts by anti-bash fundamentalists full of os.system, subprocess.run and/or subprocess.call that could have just been 15-line bourne shell scripts.

    If you’re gluing programs together, shell scripts are often the best way to do it. If you’re not gluing programs together, do you even Unix? If you want to be fundie about it, obey shellcheck.

    It sucks that bash is such a footgun. Perl was supposed to fix a lot of that, but now everyone hates it, because it also lets people to do clever and subtly incorrect things, which have then become quasi-idiomatic. Mom, can we have a sensible human-computer interface?