That’s like 50 years old!
I have a team of developers who work for me. Some are Linux/PHP/Perl/mysql guys, some are IIS/ASP/MSSQL guys (and apparently from their behavior, never the ‘twain should meet). My background is definitely biased towards the former camp, but I try to be impartial. Sometimes, though, I really see stuff that just blows my mind.
We have a payment partner who shall remain nameless (but it rhymes with “iBill”). We used to use a value from their admin interface to calculate some stats. This page changed. The 500+ line vbscript that, among other things, scraped for this value, is broken. The developer gave up on making it work. Customer service complained enough that I just sat and wrote a 1-page LWP-based script to fetch down not only that number, but the entire list of active customers, which is useful in many ways. I told the developer of the vbscript about this, and he was interested in getting at the data (it’s cron’d to pull every morning.) So, I told him the directory and server (it’s on a linux box), how he’d need a ssh client (and where to get one), and said give a holler if there’s any problems. I was curious to see what’d happen.
Cut to later that day. He tells me he can’t get on the machine because there’s too many people already connected (huh?) He shows me, sure enough, Remote Desktop says it can’t connect. I inform him that true, the linux box doesn’t support microsoft’s remote desktop. I explain again about ssh, and he must have at least read the mail, because he had installed PuTTY. He fires that up, and can’t get in. Nope, really, SSH–telnet ain’t gonna do it. OK, now password doesn’t work. Right, the linux box doesn’t understand your microsoft domain password–but it’s the same as your cvs login, which is on the same machine. OK, now he’s in. Command line. Boom. Now what? I say “well, it’s command line, but you know, like DOS”. “DOS? That’s like 50 years old!”. Sigh.
I say, “I sent you what directory it’s in in the email”, and watch. He figures out “cd” is the way to get there… good start: “cd home/pmt_logs”. No go, I tell him “you need a slash before that”. “/cd home/pmt_logs”. I correct him, he gets there. Types “dir”, and thanks to years of bash shell alias hacks being now standard on RH9, it works. After a few more moments I realize he hasn’t the faintest clue how to examine the contents of a file. He indignantly asks how is he supposed to access these files?!
I give in and just make a readonly Samba share on the box.
Why is it that the commandline is so scary to these folks? I know CMD.EXE sucks ass, but if you are a coder on windows, shouldn’t you know at least something about it, or commandlines in general? I’m not going to offer any insight that wasn’t already much more eloquently delivered in Neal Stephenson’s “In the beginning, was the commandline” book, but seriously… all Windows coders should install cygwin and read a book. I don’t hire people who can’t explain at least the concepts, if not the final meaning of a commandline shown to me by Marc Slayton years ago. (It’s goes something like this… what does this do? “cat /var/logs/httpd/access_log.tgz | tar xzf - | fgrep -v ‘.jpg’ | cut -d’ ‘ -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -50″). Needless to say, I didn’t hire any of the MS guys, they were all inherited. But I did get this same programmer from above, interested in learning some Perl [on win32], much to my surprise, so maybe there’s hope for skill expansion yet.