I think I thought of that in like, 2003, when developing my first web site. My lazy ass was just thinking of using PHP's ability to execute terminal commands to do all the heavy lifting on the backend for everything for me, because I sucked as a programmer. That would have been a terrible, terrible idea in hindsight.
This was way before I learned about form input sanitization too. I was working off of "For Dummies" books.
Send this to my last DevOps team. Jesus. They got a Rube Goldberg machine in place of sane infra. Shit’s so complicated, I know only one guy with his finger on the pulse, and that’s because he built a ton of it over 18 years!
This is great until your job outgrows a single computer or you want to have redundancy. Also, chains of bash tools don’t have the best error management when something chokes in one of the middle steps in the pipe. You can still leverage simple bash tools for a lot of the under the hood stuff, but you start needing something more to act as the glue petty quickly when you scale. KISS should still apply.
This works until you scale the team beyond 1 person and someone else needs to decipher the 30 line awk | sed | xargs monstrosity you created. Give me a real programming language any day.
I’ve hacked plenty of bash aliases, functions, and scripts using coreutils myself; but sometimes you need something a bit more robust when it comes to error handling, retrying, maintainability, and an actually distributed solution instead.
xargs on its own might be more resilient than a distributed crawler, as one would expect, but if I’m tasked with building a distributed data processing pipeline I want more guarantees from the system as a whole, not only from its individual building blocks.
The time and effort put into embedding these guarantees in hacked shell scripts running on a dozen machines might be better invested into building a more solid foundation instead.
Love ol’ Jim. My stepdad and I caught him for his 2014 tour and it’s been one of the highlights of both our live entertainment experiences lol that and seeing Rush in 2012.
Edit: “live” entertainment lol… Gotta love mobile.
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