Exhibit A: When I joined Google Fiber, one of my first projects was converting a (POSIX) shell script that had grown to 1200 lines to Python. It became something that anyone could modify, including interns, rather than something that required at least a code review from our L7 tech lead, whose time was better spent elsewhere (he was the author and our only competent shell programmer).
That is mind blowing for me in a couple ways.
* You have (at least) seven tiered support structures.
* You have only one 'competent' shell programmer in your 'reachable' project scope.
No wonder these types of language policies are in place.
It's been decades since "writing a 1000 line script" was best done in shell, if there ever was a time. Someone with that much experience ought to be a very senior engineer.
I have shell libraries that generate code via here documents and other templating that are > 500 lines. That is about as far as I reasonably go. Note that these are function (and scope specific variables (with hopefully unique namespaces)) only code bases with copious comments and references to underlying tools.
I don't know what you mean by seven tiered support structures. My tech lead was a Senior Staff Software Engineer, L7, level seven, etc. Just meant that he was a relatively senior guy (not that he didn't get his hands dirty, there were just better places for him to do so). There are lots of levels on Google's SWE job ladder.
And maintaining a 1200 line shell script that can brick hardware in people's homes and disable their WiFi (or internet access altogether) is something to be careful with. There were five or so SWEs doing wifi-related things for Fiber (including me and one other person new to the team), and yes, he was the only one of us who knew shell well enough to reliably catch mistakes. He was a few years older than the rest of us, maybe that's why.
I have a BS in CS from Georgetown and a MS in CS from Stanford. I don't think I ever had a class at either school that required me to write a single conditional statement or loop in shell. I probably never would have picked it up at Google either if I hadn't joined an embedded team.
You have deep technical ladders and they may make sense in a place like Google. Who knows. I've seen a couple young men I've mentored go to work at Google and don't hear anything negative from them.
Any code anywhere is worth being careful with and a shell script can be more dangerous than your average glue language
(tcl,python,perl) script. I don't see why you need 1200 lines of shell script unless most of it is error handling and safe execution wrapping.
Funny, I've worked at Georgetown and my grandfather went to Stanford. I've written (over 20+ years) good and bad shell scripts. They get better the older I get and they also seem to be (mostly) less than 50 lines. I don't understand why people say these things about edu unless it's intended to awe the easily impressed. Smart is smart and well rounded is well rounded anywhere.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to show off. All I meant was that I had a pretty thorough mainstream CS education. If I didn't learn shell on the way then it's safe to assume most CS students these days don't either.
