What was it like to learn Bash?

[ErikSchierboom]

We’ve recently started a project to find the best way to design our tracks, in order to optimize the learning experience of students.

As a first step, we’ll be examining the ways in which languages are unique and the ways in which they are similar. For this, we’d really like to use the knowledge of everyone involved in the Exercism community (students, mentors, maintainers) to answer the following questions:

1. How was your experience learning Bash? What was helpful while learning Bash? What did you struggle with? How did you tackle problems?
2. In what ways did Bash differ from other languages you knew at the time? What was hard to learn? What did you have to unlearn? What syntax did you have to remap? What concepts carried over nicely?

Could you spare 5 minutes to help us by answering these questions? It would greatly help us improve the experience students have learning Bash :)

Note: this issue is not meant as a discussion, just as a place for people to post their own, personal experiences.

Want to keep your thoughts private but still help? Feel free to email me at erik@exercism.io

Thank you!

[thexa4]

For me, bash is useful as glue in combining multiple utilities together to achieve the result I wanted. This resulted in me learning a lot of tricks to transform data from one form to another, mostly using generally available utilities.

The way I learned bash was totally different from other languages. I got into bash by running command line one-liners to fix stuff. Later I switched to automating workflows by combining the steps I took into bash scripts.

Finally I started to use bash to automate complex workflows like ingesting data into systems. (which is still converting data from one form to another)

One of the things I learned while learning bash is to split my programs into composable parts that take arguments and (optionally) an stdin and generate the result on stdout.

In my opinion this would mean that an exercise like Grep should be one of the earlier exercises. Things like this exercise are exactly the situations where bash is useful, when gluing other things together. Exercises that combine multiple questions from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/bash?tab=votes&pagesize=50 would probably help a lot.

I'm available on info at maxmaton nl if you have questions.

[ErikSchierboom]

We're closing this issue as it was part of our research for the v3 version of Exercism which has just been released.

Thanks everyone for chipping in! It has been greatly appreciated.