Do you not see the horrific syntax of what you just suggested as simple?

mc808 · on Jan 18, 2015

It's pretty clear what it does. It's also C#, so building up to a less trivial task will be much less horrific than

find . -type f -name '*.pgn' -print0 | xargs -0 -n4 -P4 mawk '/Result/ { split($0, a, "-"); res = substr(a[1], length(a[1]), 1); if (res == 1) white++; if (res == 0) black++; if (res == 2) draw++ } END { print white+black+draw, white, black, draw }' | mawk '{games += $1; white += $2; black += $3; draw += $4; } END { print games, white, black, draw }'

kevin_thibedeau · on Jan 19, 2015

In a real production environment that command line would be put into a script parametrized with named variables and the embedded awk scripts would be changed to here-docs.

mc808 · on Jan 19, 2015

Sounds good although at that point it's just programming, and there are tools that are cleaner and faster and more robust than piping semi-structured strings around from a command line.

The one real benefit that can be argued is ubiquity (on *ix). Not every system has Perl, Python, or Ruby installed - or Hadoop for that matter - but there's usually a programmable shell and some variant of the standard utilities that will get something done in a pinch. If it happens to be 200x faster than some enormous framework, so much the better.

peterhunt · on Jan 19, 2015

Are you arguing that shell scripts scale to larger applications better than C#?