I can't read the article now, but in my opinion the fact that it's so difficult to write robust shell scripts above a very basic level of complexity (e.g. do this, then do that, then do that, then quit) really means you should be scripting in perl/python/ruby/etc instead.
Yes, the overhead for anything quick and dirty is higher, but if you're writing libraries, you only have to write them once.
The only real benefit to writing something complex entirely in a shell script is if you can't control the environment it will run in, and you need it to run everywhere, and you can't make users install an interpreter, which are increasingly rare requirements, and even then you have to write it in `sh` anyway.
As someone who can't draw a thing, there's a phenomenon I've noticed that might apply. Every time I need to draw something out, I try to hold it clearly in my head, where it looks so complete, but of course it never works. My suspicion is that instead of actually seeing the details of what I want to draw in my head, my brain has filled them in with "here be details," which makes for a nice mental image but that doesn't really play so well on paper.
I also think the same thing happens when we write software with loose mental maps. Our brains fill in the gaps with "yadda yadda yadda," to make it feel complete, but really there's nothing there at all.
I know there are some asshole IP contracts out there, but I think even so a company would have a hard time claiming ownership of a project an employee did for someone else, in his own time.
> I wouldn't say the signup is prohibitive in any way
I would. I didn't sign up. The concept looked interesting, but there was no real information on this side of the sign-up wall. For me, there really is a mental effort in establishing One More Relationship with One More Website.
If a user logs in, and their work factor is the low one, authenticate them, and then calculate the new hash with the higher work factor, and save the new hash and work factor.
I guess "local optimum" wasn't the right word. I got suck in a configuration in which my breed() method couldn't get closer to the goal, because it was just shuffling around characters that existed at the start. (I had started with 1001 randomly generated 13-byte sequences.)
Yes, the overhead for anything quick and dirty is higher, but if you're writing libraries, you only have to write them once.
The only real benefit to writing something complex entirely in a shell script is if you can't control the environment it will run in, and you need it to run everywhere, and you can't make users install an interpreter, which are increasingly rare requirements, and even then you have to write it in `sh` anyway.