mdsh VS events

Telling computers what to do and how to do it is an art, a craft, a practice, a discipline, a medium, a profession, and a science (and probably a few more categories besides). It is just isn't (usually) all of those things at once. Most of the difficulties we have in discussions about the subject have to do with category errors. Literate Programming has stylistic, technical, toolchain, and disciplinary aspects, and Knuth's exemplar demonstrated these. It was then critiqued on pragmatic grounds. I'm not sure if this counts as a bait and switch, rope a dope, or strawman.

I mean, if I was participating in a computer programming class and given the same problem as an assignment, I would write a program to satisfy the requirements. If then told that I should have written a few lines of shell script instead and given a poor grade, I would be livid at the instructor.

As an aside, I was interested to know if there are LP tools for shell scripting. A cursory search turned this up:

https://github.com/bashup/mdsh

Would there happen to be any utilities to execute entire org-mode files, similar to bashup's mdsh? This allows users to execute markdown files via bash. I'd like to combine it with a nix-shell shebang!

You might find bashup.events interesting. Here's a section in a blog post where I ~explained it using an example similar to your timer. (I simplified it for the example, but I use a more complete version of this approach to calculate command duration in https://github.com/abathur/shellswain)

Author here. To give credit where it's due, the event system is from https://github.com/bashup/events, and it's just as useful for writing modular bash in other contexts.

A near non-sequitur per your aside (I agree with the rest...): https://github.com/bashup/events is one of my favorite little things. I even blogged about it in January!