[TriLUG] The thin line...

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Rick DeNatale wrote:

> I know that we've got members who consider themselves sysadmins, and
> others who consider themselves programmers.
>
> I'm curious about how much overlap in tools there is between these two
> self-perceptions.

Tool overlap will be high.  The more interesting distinction will be in 
how those tools are utilized, really.

> So for the sysadmins among us how many of you are using any of the
> following to do sysadmin tasks.  I'm talking here about managing your
> scripts and configuration files, not using these tools to get or
> install software from source:
>
> 1) make (or less likely perhaps, ant or rake)

I unfortunately maintain a system which is heavily based on make for 
config file maintenance, image generation, and distribution.  It does 
work, but I'm working very hard to replace it with something more 
maintainable.

> 2) A configuration management/repository system like cvs or subversion.

Daily.  Heck, hourly.  These days for anything larger than about a 2-3 
machine shop, you really need to get things into RCS at the least, or 
preferably something larger with some glue to push the files out (cvs, 
svn, cfengine or a package repo with some policies, whatever makes you 
happy).

> And on a scale of 0 (don't use it at all) through 1 (pure programming
> language) to 10 (pure scripting language) where do you put your use of
> these languages?

I'm not quite sure I understand this.  How would you use c/c++ as a 
"pure scripting language" or shell as a "pure programming language"?  
:)  I'll adopt the 0 (never use) to 10 (use extensively) scale.

>    bash or your favorite shell

5 -- mostly for shell foo, one liners to mash stuff together to get 
quick data or work with things in real time.  Something like this might 
be an example:
$ verbose_command | grep -v 'useless_data' | cut -f 2 -d\: | sed -e 
's/_/ /g' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

>    perl

2 - not so much anymore.  I was a big perl fan, but it's reasonably 
discouraged at Google these days, so I don't do any new code, just the 
occasional maintenance.

>    python

9 - the scripting language of choice at work, thus I spend a lot of time 
cranking out Python code.  Normally I wouldn't put this quite so high, 
as I prefer not to spend my days writing code, but see the previous 
comment about make.  :)

>    ruby

0 - icky.  :)  Common in some other groups with in Google (notably 
SysOps, our internal SAs who run things like internal email, filers, etc 
etc), but generally discouraged through out eng.

>    php

4 - I do a fair bit of this on the side, and some of our internal stuff 
is in PHP so I end up getting my hands dirty with ugly debugging here 
some times.

>    c(++)

It's good foo, but I'm rarely in a position to have to deal with C code 
directly these days.  My c++ skills are pretty mediocre, at best, and my 
C isn't much better.  I can get by and fix code, and write simple apps 
if the need for speed arises, but I've never had the cause to build or 
maintain anything large in C or C++.

>    COBOL <G>

Does this really need an answer?  :)  0, of course.  What, do you think 
I'm a geezer?  *grin*

Aaron S. Joyner