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Comment on The productivity paradox of AI coding assistants

The point I’m making is that bash is optimized for quickly writing throwaway code. It doesn’t matter if the code written blows up in some case other than the one you’re using. You don’t need to handle edge cases that don’t apply to the one time that you will run the code. I write lots of bash code that doesn’t handle a bunch of edge cases, because for my one-off use, that edge case doesn’t arise. Similarly, if an LLMs is generating code that misses some edge case, if it’s a situation that will never arise, and that may not be a problem.

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artwork@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I am sorry, but I still don’t get what you mean. And why Bash and not another shell?
Why not another shell like Korn, Ash, Dash, Zsh, Fish, or anything REPL, including PHP, Perl, Node, Python etc.

Should we consider “throwaway” anything that supports interactive mode of your daily driver you chose in your default terminal prompt?
What does “throwaway” code means in the first place?

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- caseyweederman@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I… think they might be misusing the word “bash”? Maybe?
  
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  - caseyweederman@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Yeah, I went back through this reply chain and I couldn’t find any explicit evidence that they’re talking about shell scripting at all, and perhaps think that the “bash programming language” refers to a general style, i.e. “to bash stuff together until it works”.
    
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- tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  
  And why Bash and not another shell?
  
  I chose it for my example because I happen to use it. You could use another shell, sure.
  
  Should we consider “throwaway” anything that supports interactive mode of your daily driver you chose in your default terminal prompt?
  
  Interactive mode is a good case for throwaway code, but one-off scripts would also work.
  
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  - artwork@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    If you want to actually realize the amount of possible misunderstanding in the current conversation and of what shell scriting is, please do consider joning #bash at Libera IRC. Since there’s literally no understanding on what you mean still, sorry.
    
    For a very simple example, there are literally no documentation regarding certain cases you’ll encounter in Bash’s built-ins even, unless you encounter it or learn from its source code. Not to mention shenanigans of shell use for inter-process communication (IPC), file-descriptors, and pipes.
    
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