experience: scripting vs programming - 1

[AmitKumarDas]

• Given: Most of your day job is around file handling, packaging, etc.
• Given: Alternatively, you work in build & release operations
• Then: Scripting seems to be a natural choice with its terse logic, &
  • the plethora of CLIs available to further reduce the lines of logic
• Fact: File operations & unix philosophy goes hand-in-hand
• However: Addition of business requirements makes scripting a bad choice
• E.g.: I want to dry run the logic in production systems
• E.g.: I run the logic in mission critical environments
  • Like hospitals, meteorology, transport, telecom, industrial automation, etc.
  • Or even your startup where you do not want to lose a customer for a syntactical error
• E.g.: I want to run the logic in different OSes & architectures
• E.g.: I want to bank on multiple release versions due to complex maintenance windows
• E.g.: I want to run your tests in my systems (i.e. enduser platforms, etc.)
• Then: We must switch to programming languages that are designed to be safe
• E.g.: Above translates to following technical requirements:
  • Compile time checks,
  • Idempotent operations,
  • Supply chain security,
  • Build reproducibility,
  • Forward & backward compatibility,
  • Testing, etc.
• And: Above translates into several non technical requirements like:
  • Investing in teams, plans / sprints, designs, etc.
• Summary: Ensure correct logic instead of writing logic in few lines of code
• Summary: Simple logic (or less lines of code) is relative
• Summary: Instead focus on production grade logic