I tried to lean shell scripting in the summer of 2000. It seemed doable: isn’t it basically executing a bunch of shell commands in a row? I got some books, which I read half-heartedly, tried a few things, and then gave up. Shell scripting, which I had hoped would be the easiest entrée into programming, was too hard.

I think part of the problem was the undeveloped state of learn-to-code resources in the early 2000s. I wanted the hand-holding of resources like Codecademy and Treehouse to make those first steps, but if something like that existed in the summer of 2000, I never found it.

Also, I think my approach was conceptually not helpful. Stringing a bunch of shell commands together does not make a programmer. There were a lot of core programming concepts that I was ignoring entirely. In hindsight, I think it makes more sense to learn core ideas – like variables, loops, functions, boolean, and so on – and bring those concepts back to shell scripting.

With a bit of perspective from time spent learning things like python and javascript in the past year, shell scripting recently began to make much more sense. I now have some ksh scripts automating library processes: like restarting certain programs when needed, or clearing out logs periodically. A shell script, triggered by cron, is much more reliable at doing this than I am. Our library projects benefit from this reliability. Unfortunately, I just took the very long road to finally being able to write those scripts.