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
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