Following my woes of recently re-installing postgres as a result of a knee-jerk burning down my whole home-brew install. I’ve decided to pick BASH as my first language for the 12in23 Exercism challenge. 

First impression was that this Exercism track is missing a lot of the information that more developed tracks provide, requiring you to take ownership of finding out where how and what needs to be done for things to work (aka. Exercise google and stack-overflow fu). The list of resources provided initially is exhaustive but it’s missing something super low effort that provides the absolute basics.

Few interesting bits of information that stuck with me over the 5 BASH exercises:

Bash uses $((<insert math here>)) for mathematical operations

To find length of string use

To iterate length of string times using a for loop you can use a C style for loop:

Bash supports += syntax for both adjusting a numbers and adding to a string

I found bash to be difficult but fun. It’s the first language I’ve tried that cares about spaces as much as it does, and it doesn’t have nearly as many “don’t cut yourself” features as ruby. There are a few behaviours that are difficult, and edge cases that had me scratching my head. 

It was an awesome first choice, I’ll likely come back to it as understanding more of what is happening under the hood of my terminal and scripts that I’m running has been interesting to me.

Thanks again #exercism for the #12in23, can’t wait to find some time for my next choice! See you in the next one!