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100% this

(Also for anything that needs to work on a shell script or whatever)

I roll my eyes every time some "super secure secret generator" gives me a password with &^%#$ that I need to use on a shell script. Thanks for making my life harder I guess

"oh but you just need to escape them" Yes please be my guest trying to deal with character escape whack-a-mole

 help



It makes me sad that shells, operating systems and languages have basically made zero progress / had zero innovation in the last 60 years.

"Escaping" should be something some graybeard is mumbling about.

Yet here we are in 2026, still having to be on the lookout for a wild /../

Even PowerShell is boilerplate, boilerplate galore.


It's just a fundamental problem of encoding the boundary between different (meta-)languages in-band. It will always be a problem, until it's possible to implement the separation out-band, which makes the respective language no longer self-contained, as it needs to be implemented in the layer above.

This occurs now with LLMs too. It's a fundamental problem, of the problem description, not the implementation.


Yeah, the innovation would be to not make everything in-band. Which implies proper file formats for source code for example. I know, that is blasphemy against 7bit ASCII.

It's like the telephone networks of old. They eventually realized that that is not so good. The computer world is still in its analog telephone phase. ;-)


Yes I want to scream everytime a tool gives me crap for "no newline at end of file" or other similar BS

I don't care. I never cared. And every sane tool knows how to deal with it

Shut up and stop thinking we're still in the 70s




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