In this post, I argue that in programming, it is no longer about Bash or any other language. It is about habits of mind. The shell merely provides the vocabulary through which we learn them.

Most programming books begin with variables, loops, and functions. A textsmith, however, encounters programming from the opposite direction: composition. Before writing a single if statement, they are already composing grep, sort, awk, sed, pandoc, and dozens of other tools into something larger. By the time they sit down to learn a programming language, they have already been programming—they simply didn’t call it that.

This post continues the discussion on shell scripting. In a sense, a shell script is simply text that instructs other text-processing tools how to cooperate.

How does one become a programmer? Based on my own experience, this is all about agency—the moment you stop waiting for software to exist and start creating software that fits your own way of working. The key is discovering that if configuration isn’t enough, you can write the missing tool yourself.

This week’s book helps every textsmith to understand shell scripting—the subject we had been dealing with starting last week. It also complements Efficient Linux at the Command Line by moving from using the shell effectively to teaching it to work for you.