Before you rise in righteous indignation, let me say that that doesn'tmean that you can't write programs in the Bourne shell; you can writeprograms in anything that's Turing-complete if you try hard enough.It's just that you shouldn't.

The problem with writing programs in the Bourne shell is the same aswriting programs in any other highly constrained language: your programs come out all but unreadablebecause they are spending most of their time getting around the inherentlimitations of their

There is a constant tension in system administration between doingthings by hand in the standard way, versus creating your own customsystems to automate the work. Doing things by hand takes longer and ismore tedious, so it sounds like automation should be a slamdunk, butthe problem with automation is that you've created a new local piece ofsoftware that has to be updated, maintained, learned by other people(especially new people), and understood.

(Or to put it another way, you have taken something

One of the things that is usually cited in favour of Macs (and Windows)is that the core of the GUI interface is more or less standardized,unlike many Unix programs. For example, consider the huge disagreementamong xterm , GNU Emacs, and Firefox about how simple copy and pasteworks; surely the Mac or Windows way is better than that.

I don't think so.

My view is that it is easily possible to overdo an adherence tostandardized interfaces, because standardized interfaces only reallymatter if you