serhart

I'm not who you replied to, but no, no, I don't think that's an "opposition" to writing in the sense that it's making us stupid or replacing oral traditions.

From my limited understanding of history and Greek philosophy, Socrates valued dialogue, a "back and forth" for understanding. Basically a scientific method of probing to understand something or someone. This needs to exist to be fully sure you understand something. Sort of what we are doing now.

A static piece of literature or a speech can't be probed for more clarity. You may read something and come off with a completely different understanding from the author. You might even pervert or "abuse" the original intent since words can have multiple interpretations.

I don't think there was opposition in the sense that you shouldn't write. My understanding is just that in order to truly understand something, you need a dialogue. It allows you to actually arrive at what was meant to be conveyed.

It actually seems sort of ironic that people are saying this about Socrates because of what was written about him….

Yes, that is very much what they were. However, they used the term compiler in very much the same way it's used today. It didn't mean something different. The concept of the "compiler" was to translate mathematical symbols (or predefined machine code representing that math) and later English like words into programs a machine could execute.

That is absolutely not true. Just because early compilers acted more like linker/loader doesn't mean they used the word compiler to mean "linker". When the term was coined it absolutely meant translating mathematical formulas into machine code. Compiler very much had the same meaning it has today.

> Use a good text parsing library. Regexes are probably not enough for your use case. In case you are not aware of the limitations of regexes you may want to learn about Chomsky hierarchy of formal languages.

Most programming languages offer a regex engine capable of matching non-regular languages. I agree though, if you are actually trying to _parse_ text then a regex is not the right tool. It just depends on your use case.

How is it not a matter of familiarity? Just because it's not intuitive to you doesn't mean it's bad. I find anything not in an S-expression to be atrocious. Doesn't mean I can't learn and understand "horrible" syntax where I have to separate things with semicolons...

I don't agree at all. I don't find it less "readable". You just have to be used to it. If you understand English, German isn't that hard of a language to learn. Japanese would probably be a little bit harder to pick up though. Doesn't mean Japanese is unreadable

Sure, but bash only has certain language constructs. This implementation is using parameter expansion and some other built ins. It's definitely more complex than yours, but that's what bash has to offer.

Yes, but I think that's antithetical to what languages like bash and perl are trying to do. Someone well versed in the language can do some pretty complex operations in a few keystrokes.

I'm in no way defending bash as a language. There are lots of gotchas and weird constructs. I avoid bash too. It's just that trim function isn't that cryptic or "unreadable" if you know the syntax.

Just because you seem to be unfamiliar with bash doesn’t mean it’s unreadable. Almost any language will look cryptic if you don’t know it. That function is mostly just parameter expansion and very common in most bash scripts. I bet if you read the manual you would easily be able to figure it out. You just have to learn the language.