Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 30th May 2008 07:54 UTC, submitted by fairynomo
General Development Tuesday, we linked to an interview with one of the creators of AWK, over at ComputerWorld. From the same series comes an interview with Chat Ramney, maintainer of BASH, the Bourne Again Shell. BASH is the default shell on most UNIX systems, and has been ported to Windows, MS-DOS, the Amiga, and just about everywhere else.
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RE: fast
by shapeshifter on Fri 30th May 2008 10:26 UTC in reply to "fast"
shapeshifter
Member since:
2006-09-19

No week passes without using bash. I use bash very often, although it is mainly for issuing simple commands like cd, rm -r, find -i foo* and vi.

Recently, I read about zsh. I tried it for a few seconds, but I preferred bash' tab completion better than zsh's. Still, I should give zsh a better try. Are there some users here who can elaborate on zsh vs bash? This summer, I want to learn my girlfriend to use Linux and a *nix shell, and I have to choose between bash and zsh. Zsh is more modern, but bash is included in the default install of most distros.

That said, I am very happy with bash. It never let me down, it's easy to use, and more advanced uses are possible too. Thumbs up for bash!


Dude, there are better things to do with a girlfriend.
But if a good bashing is what she wants then so be it.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 14

RE[2]: fast
by evert on Fri 30th May 2008 11:09 in reply to "RE: fast"
evert Member since:
2005-07-06

Maybe you should look for a relationship which contains more than sex. It's fun!

She is studying medical subjects and preparing for doing biomedical research. I feel that persons who want to do research, and have to work with computer tools and lage quantities of data, should at least have some minimal understanding of their tools. Some basic programming, knowing the parts of a computer, and understanding of the "filesystem" and "encoding" concepts are important. Working from a command line gives control and understanding, and sometimes is faster and easier than working with a GUI.

That's why advanced medical researchers work with S or R (command line programmable statistics packages), and not with SPSS which has a nice GUI but is more suitable for beginners.

Edit: A few days ago, she mailed me a few microscopy photo's from her professor. It was a powerpoint file. Yes, copied and pasted in powerpoint and mailed that way. That's what you get by keeping users dumb.

Edited 2008-05-30 11:11 UTC

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 5

RE[3]: fast
by Doc Pain on Fri 30th May 2008 18:53 in reply to "RE[2]: fast"
Doc Pain Member since:
2006-10-08

Edit: A few days ago, she mailed me a few microscopy photo's from her professor. It was a powerpoint file. Yes, copied and pasted in powerpoint and mailed that way. That's what you get by keeping users dumb.


No, that's what you get (I got it once): "May I send you a video clip that I found?" - "Yes, of course." - And what did I get? A "Powerpoint" file which contained two RAR archives that contained a ZIP file that contained an animated GIF file. Yes, it's possible!

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

Programming and SPSS
by peckjonk on Sun 1st Jun 2008 01:59 in reply to "RE[2]: fast"
peckjonk Member since:
2008-06-01

It is true that SPSS has a sophisticated user interface that makes it easy to get started. but the commenter appears to be unaware that it also has powerful programming capabilities.

Besides its long standing traditonal syntax command language, SPSS has plugged in the Python, R, and .NET languages, so it is highly programmable and can use the extensive Python and R mathematical and statistical libraries to supplement its built-in capabilities.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1