[Israel.pm] Perl job in Jerusalem

[Oron Peled]

On Tuesday 27 January 2004 17:18, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> C-Shell? Don't they know that C-shell programming is considered harmful?
> 
> http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/
> 
> (By Tom Christiansen, mind you)
> 
> Who can take this kind of job seriously? ;-)

While what you say is basically right, the truth is that there are large
organizations using csh/tcsh (normall for small) scripts for historical
reasons. During the 80's there was a tradeoff between using csh/tcsh
which offer significat ease of use (job control, history mechanisms, aliases)
and Bourne shell (which was good for writing scripts). Many organizations
standardised on csh/tcsh.

This was further accelerated by the success of Sun Microsystems at the time
which shiped SunOS (a BSD-derived Unix) -- W.Joy wrote both csh and vi
and was one of the founders of Sun. So organisations which started using
Unix in the 80's are mostly "csh-lovers". As a good example think about
the Technion -- they teach csh in MATAM (which is an obligatory subject
for CS students).

Of course nowdays the primary shell is bash because it offers both:
  - A convenient interactive environment with all the goodies tcsh
    have (programmed completion, job control, dirstack, etc.)
  - POSIX compatible scripting

So the correct attitude is IMO:
  If you know csh/tcsh scripting (including the problems), and bash
  than you may have the right skills to support csh now and slowly
  migrate the people to bash (without breaking production...)

-- 
Oron Peled                             Voice/Fax: +972-4-8228492
oron at actcom.co.il                  http://www.actcom.co.il/~oron

"Beware of bugs in the above code;
 I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
                              -- Donald E. Knuth