[chef-dev] Re: Dialect support and loading enhancements

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Sep 20, 2013, at 10:54 AM, Julian C. Dunn 
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 wrote:

> Sysadmins "program" all the time. We see nothing wrong with hacking up
> some bash, Perl, sendmail.cf (</joking>) to solve a problem. Call it
> by another name if you like ("scripting") but it's still programming.
> We shouldn't add features to our software to solve a semantics
> problem.

I've known a number of people who have had no end of problems with Sendmail.  
After I recognized that it was a 4th generation self-recursive production 
language much like the Prolog language we used when I was a senior in 
college, I never had any problems with it afterwards -- and I became the 
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ maintainer, and so on.

But my being able to script in bash, perl, etc... doesn't make me a natural 
programmer.  There comes a point where a difference in scale becomes a 
difference in kind, and with regards to scripting versus programming, I am 
permanently stuck on the short end of that stick.

--
Brad Knowles 
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LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>