Scripting discussion (Was: scripting fun)

[Steve Lamb]

On Fri, June 6, 2008 12:05 pm, Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:
> Yep.  But remember, us old Unix hackers from 20 years ago did not have
> all those nifty languages at our disposal. :-)

    Too true.  On the other, other hand I did say I went back 10 years and
most of that's covered in Perl and Python now.  ^.^

> I am always careful to follow the parameter passing conventions
> and the I/O conventions, so I can put the new command in a shell
> pipeline, if I need to.

    That I can get behind.  Shell as the most basic of glue.

    Though recently my Python has morphed into "Everything is a library". 
Almost every script ends with this block:

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()
else:
    print 'Foo v%s loaded.' % version

    Run it standalone it does the right thing.  I need its functionality in
another Python script I need only import this one and then call
foo.main().  For those, like me, who program organically this gets to be
very natural and very fast after a while.


> Another thing I do religiously id put all the
> code I write under some kind of source code control system, so when I
> make changes I can back them out if I need to.  It also allows me to see
> how a program evolves over time.

    Mercurial, mercurial, mercurial.  Finally got myself and one other
person at work to use hg religiously and it's saved out bacon a few
times now.  Not to mention its fun watching the branching we do when
we're both developing in our own repositories before pushing back to the
main repo.

-- 
Steve Lamb