I was making a (dark) humor joke about the state of everything else going on - really not trying to dig on small joys or your excitement about MicroCenter in any way.
I enjoy MicroCenter and have benefitted from being a few hours from several.
Not sure where you feel like this timeline could be a dream because you’re getting a micro center with everything else that’s happening.
Good for you.
Facts:
You need to understand what it’s doing to keep it on track or a lot of time to head down all of its dead ends.
You need to understand your intent and project in order to recognize that it’s hallucinating.
When it magically decides variables or other factors need new unused names while mid way through any project, you have to watch out for that- you have to be able to audit everything it does and constantly restate the whole project in chunks.
We saw the one off example of a coder beating an LLM at code production recently.
I don’t expect LLM coding or reasoning to be good for a while.
I can understand that. There are several expression ‘rules’ that don’t feel right to me.
As a wonder, what’s your ‘first’ language? Did you like it?
I’d guess that might influence your preferences.
I started with (iirc, in order) batch, bash, python, powershell, go, typescript, rust.
I’m not putting all the ‘markup’ languages in there.
It sounds like the main point of confusion for you with semicolons, especially in bash and its if/then statements, isn’t about their general readability but more about their role in defining what counts as a complete statement or command, and when they are required versus optional.
You’re right that bash requires a semicolon (or a newline) after the if condition before the then keyword if they are on the same line. This is because then is considered a separate ‘command’ or keyword that follows the if condition and its associated [ ] or (( )) test.
A newline serves the same purpose as a semicolon.
In contrast, languages like Lua, Python, or PowerShell often have syntax where then (or its equivalent) is intrinsically linked to the if and doesn’t require a separator between the condition and the block opening keyword, even on the same line. They typically use newlines or specific block delimiters (like end in Lua, indentation in Python, or curly braces {} in PowerShell) to define the scope of the if statement.
While the semicolon’s general use is to put multiple commands on one line, its mandatory placement after the if condition before then in bash when on the same line is a specific syntactic requirement of bash to separate those two distinct logical parts of the if construct. Many other languages simply define if condition then block as a single syntactic unit, hence no semicolon is needed there.
It is unnecessary. It’s only needed when you keep them on the same line. E.g.:
if [ "$variable" == "value" ]
then
echo "Condition is true"
fi
That ; can be used anywhere in bash or powershell for the same effect
That semicolon is the same use in both languages, why the hangup? It’s a way to put separate commands on the same line.
PowerShell tried to build everything around the verb-noun command naming structure, which improves readability.
What’d the semicolon ever do to you?
Except when it happens, like in strange new world, or the next generation.
They store living beings for extended periods in the pattern buffer.
In Strange new worlds it was a hyper advanced thing, in TNG it was Scotty.