[clue] seeking advice cleaning up root

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

Ahem,

I will not comment on the issue of using symbolic links, but I do not
think I can let this statement slide by:

>Good programmers do not. They take the time to learn enough about the
>OS to write the most optimal code available.

"Most optimal code" is in the eye of the beholder.  Often the trade-off
in saving machine cycles is overwhelmed by the human time lost in doing
the optimization.

I will be the first person to state that a good programmer should know
how a compiler generates code, and may even alter their code so a
particular compiler (gcc for instance) will generate more optimal code.
It is one of the reasons why I despair over computer science departments
that do not teach machine and assembler language.  I do not expect
people to spend much of their coding career writing assembler, but they
should understand the trade offs of the computer architectures.

However, if we were to all generate "most optimal code" (meaning most
efficient code) all the time, then we probably would not get much done,
and probably we should be ignoring the operating system and writing to
the bare metal.

>(For the record: Most of us who write in bash, perl, php, python, ruby
>etc are *scripters* and not programmers.)

I consider "scripters" to be "programmers", and particularly if it is a
one-off job.  The shell programs in Unix have been fairly optimized over
the years to give good performance, and the programmer who recognizes
the trade-offs between writing, testing and debugging new "C" code to do
a task versus writing a simple script that does the same thing (to me)
is the sign of a great programmer, not just a "good" one.

Warmest regards,

maddog