Besides the fact that shell scripts aren't scalable (in terms of horizontal scalability like actor model), I would also like to point out that shell scripts should be simple, but if you want to handle something that big, you essentially and definitely is using it as a programming language in disguise -- not ideal and I would like to go Go or Rust instead.
We don't live in 1999 any more. A big machine with a database can serve ervyone in the US and I can fit it in my closet.
It's like people are stuck in the early 2000s when they start thinking about computer capabilities. Today I have more flops in a single GPU under my desk than did the worlds largest super computer in 2004.
> It's like people are stuck in the early 2000s when they start thinking about computer capabilities.
This makes sense, because the code people write makes machines feel like they're from the early 2000's.
This is partially a joke, of course, but I think there is a massive chasm between the people who think you immediately need several computers to do things for anything other than redundancy, and the people who see how ridiculously much you can do with one.
> It's like people are stuck in the early 2000s when they start thinking about computer capabilities.
Partly because the "cloud" makes all its money renting you 2010s-era hardware at inflated prices, and people are either too naive or their career is so invested in it that they can't admit to being ripped off and complicit of the scam.
That's what gets me about AWS.
When it came out in 2006 the m1.small was about what you'd get on a mid range desktop at that point. It cost $876 a year [0]. Today for an 8 core machine with 32 gb ram you'll pay $3145.19 [1].
It used to take 12-24 months for you to pay enough AWS bills that it would make sense to buy the hardware outright. Now it's 3 months or less for every category and people still defend this. For ML work stations it's weeks.
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/dropping-prices-again-ec2-r...
[1] https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/m8g.2xlarge?region=us-e...
Hardware has gotten so much cheaper and easier and yet everyone is happy nobody has "raised prices".....
I added performance testing to all our endpoints from the start, so that people don’t start to normalize those 10s response times that our last system had (cry)
Well that's what happens when you move away from compiled languages to interpreted.
> Besides the fact that shell scripts aren't scalable…
What are you trying to say there? My understanding is that, way under the hood, a set of shell scripts is in fact enabling the scalable nature of… the internet.
...that's only for early internet, and the early internet is effing broken at best
> My understanding is that, way under the hood, a set of shell scripts is in fact enabling the scalable nature of… the internet.
I sure hope not. The state of error handling in shell scripts alone is enough to disqualify them for serious production systems.
If you're extremely smart and disciplined it's theoretically possible to write a shell script that handles error states correctly. But there are better things to spend your discipline budget on.
My half tongue-in-cheek comment was implying things like "you can't boot a linux/bsd box without shell scripts" which would make the whole "serving a website" bit hard.
I realize that there exists OS's that are an exception to this rule. I didn't understand the comment about scripts scaling. It's a script, it can do whatever you want.
Shell scripts don't scale up to implementing complex things, IME. If I needed to do something complex that had to be a shell script for some reason, I'd probably write a program to generate that shell script rather than writing it by hand, and I think many of those system boot scripts etc. are generated rather than written directly.