[Haifux] My "Stop Using (and Teaching) C-Shell and Tcsh" Page

[Shlomi Fish]

On Monday 08 October 2007, Orr Dunkelman wrote:
> Shlomi hi,
>
> I've gone over your page quickly, and I fount it a bit unsatisfying. You
> claim the page to contain anti-C-shell page, but the first reason not to
> use csh is because some other guy two guys) tell other not to do it.
>
> It's like saying "Israel should be taken apart" and give the first reason
> as: "ahmenijahad told so".
>
> From the discussion point of view this is not that coherent.
>

You are right that claiming something is so and so just because someone said 
so is a logical fallacy. However, the reason I gave these two sources as the 
first reason is because they are excellent sources which give many good and 
true arguments that I'd rather not repeat or paraphrase in my document. So 
it's not who said that that's the reason, it's what was said there. As I 
said:

<<<<<<<<<<<<
Tom Christiansen (of Perl fame) wrote Csh Considered Harmful, which gives many 
good arguments for csh's inadequacy as a shell scripting language. Bruce 
Barnett's "Top Ten Reasons not to use the C shell" gives more convincing 
arguments, and illustrates how awful csh is.
>>>>>>>>>>>>

> As for the fact that you label it as "anti-C-shell", well, I suggest you
> turn it into a positive paper about *sh is so much better, rather than
> saying csh is bad.

Hmmmppp... people keep telling me that they want to see "Pro-X" instead 
of "Anti-Y". But sometimes criticising something as bad is a good idea. I'm 
tired of people teaching C-shell and abusing it, and that's what this page is 
about.

>
> And another thing, I once saw several technion students trying to figure
> out a perl script. They tried to something, which I succeeded to do in less
> than 15 minutes using tcsh commands. Does that mean that perl script should
> be abolished in exchange for tcsh? If you say that there were two technion
> students who tried doing something and failed - A) it might be a bad couple
> of students (you know, the fact that you are a Technion student does not
> transform you into a god) 

It does not. But these were two Technion students who made it into the 
EE "Intro to Operating Systems" course, and who studied in EE. So they 
weren't bad. I know it was a problem because I solved the same exercise while 
ignoring the case of directory names with whitespace. 

> B) they might be student without any background 
> in tcsh (let's say two guys from chemistry had to tweak such a script) 

They studied tcsh in Mamat, I'm sure of that.

> C) 
> they are far from being a statistical majority (As most of the students in
> the Technion succeed in using tcsh).

Yes, while ignoring such cases as whitespace in filenames.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

>
> Orr.
>
> On 10/6/07, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il> wrote:
> > Hi all!
> >
> > We discussed the C-shell in these mailing lists before. A few days ago I
> > decided to set up the definitive anti-C-shell page, based on an email I
> > wrote, so I did:
> >
> > http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/anti/csh/
> >
> > Comments are welcome.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> >         Shlomi Fish
> >
> > P.S: a Google search for 'anti csh' yields as first results some obscure
> > genetics pages:
> >
> > http://www.google.com/search?q=anti+csh&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
> >
> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
> > Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/
> >
> > If it's not in my E-mail it doesn't happen. And if my E-mail is saying
> > one thing, and everything else says something else - E-mail will conquer.
> >     -- An Israeli Linuxer
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Haifux at haifux.org
> > http://hamakor.org.il/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haifux



-- 

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

If it's not in my E-mail it doesn't happen. And if my E-mail is saying
one thing, and everything else says something else - E-mail will conquer.
    -- An Israeli Linuxer