“You’ve always been told to write maintainable code. All of
those fancy books on Extreme Programming and every computer science
course you’ve ever had has emphasized commenting and clarity and
all of those other broccoli-is-good-for-you-so-clean-your-plate
directives. This article, and its second half, are about the
opposite of that—unreadable code, inscrutable code, and
disposable code. But, also, indispensable code. It is the editor we
will use that will be the dominating factor in the way we write our
code, however, and that editor is the bash command line prompt.“The first part of this series focuses on that versatile editor
and the magic you can weave by combining fundamental concepts of
UNIX with a healthy disregard for public safety…”