ten years of free software -- part 10 (shoop)
Adding object oriented programming to posix shell is the kind of mind game
that programmers play from time to time to keep themselves sharp. It takes
some doing to work out how to abuse and triply nest the eval command to
make something like this possible, and then you take care to implement it
in an absurdly elegant way. Then you brag about it for days, and possibly
years.
Some other likeminded madmen get into the act and things verge toward satire as whole schools of thought are recapitulated in the growing monstrosity. It becomes somewhat notorious.
You loose interest and don't stress about what will happen to it, but later versions never seem to quite have that original spark that was in the early code, that you keep to look over on a blue moon.
Eventually you realise that you actually learned some important things along the way, and are astounded to find yourself with some later serious projects that owe ideas to that fevered dream.
Five years later, sourceforge is still sending you spam moderation requests from a mailing list about it you never created, and from which you cannot find out how to remove yourself.
Ah shoop, the most fun I ever had with #!/bin/sh.