joshstaiger

1000 times this.

You're going to get a lot of snark from people saying things like "don't", or "learn python instead".

This epitomizes "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".

Bash has many cringeworthy aspects, but we have to deal with the world as it is, not the world as we would like it to be, and the reality is that bash is the default shell on 99.9% of unix boxes you encounter — even if you use an alt shell on your machine.

Coworkers machine? Bash. Default AWS AMI? Bash. init script to bootstrap $DAEMON? Bash. ssh to a server at your workplace? Bash. Random O'Reilly Linux tutorial? Assumes bash.

My advice?

Take some time.

Sit down.

and read "man bash"

cover-to-cover.

at least once.

A lot of the illogical things in bash make a lot more sense once you understand its parsing/expansion rules. And once you understand what is in the language vs an external terminal program in your PATH.

Since that sounds unappealing (and I scoffed at that very advice for many years), I've also found the wooledge bash guide to be very helpful.

I'm not sure if you'll see this 2 days later, but I've been trying to make heads or tails of your example and I think there’s a mistake in there somewhere.

Maybe I'm hopelessly lost, but, for one, the inverse of

    ( 1  1  1)
    ( 1  2  3)
    ( 1  2  4)

is not:

    ( 2 -1  0)
    (-3  2 -1)
    ( 1 -2  1)

On the off chance you see this, any pointers?

Your code stops compiling with a pretty unhelpful error message. Y'know, like Segmentation Fault 11, and a stack trace into the swift compiler sourcecode if you're lucky.

XCode doesn't always crash (though it does, frequently), but syntax highlighting goes away at the first hint of an issue.

1000 times this. I've been really enthusiastic about the idea of a modern, compiled, type safe, systems language, backed by a major tech juggernaut.

But the compiler crashes and sourcekit instability are just breathtaking (even in 3.0+). I'm surprised I haven't seen this get more attention.

I'd (somewhat) expected something like this for the first few releases, but two years in I'm starting to think the team bit off more than they can chew with the type system.