4 ms·

Bash is flat-out not a scripting language. It is a command language. It does not support typed variables, or named parameters, or any number of basic scripting

Bash is flat-out not a scripting language. It is a command language. It does not support typed variables, or named parameters, or any number of basic scripting language features. It technically does not even provide an 'if' construct. It's sufficient as a 'glue layer', and the Unix toolchain is nice, but it provides next to nothing in the way of abstraction, and that's liable to become a problem closer to the 1000 character mark than 1000 lines. My rough heuristic is, "no more than ten lines, nor more than two variables." Yes, that's short almost to the point of absurdity. The only good thing that one can say about Bash as a scripting language is that it's better than csh. Bash is taken seriously because of its longevity and ubiquity, but it's fundamentally limited in what it can express, and it is quite trivial to exceed those limitations.

arghwhat 9y ago
This one gets it. What I want from an interactive shell is not what I want from a programming language.
- solarkraft 9y ago
  I wondered this while reading the article. Do we really need the same language for commands & for programming? Portability is nice, but it seems like the requirements are a bit different for one-liners vs scripts you need to maintain.
zbentley 9y ago
Well, Perl back in the bad old days (4 and earlier) was very similar in terms of limited "minimum standard" facilities, but tons of people used it as a general purpose scripting language and hacked together some really huge systems. It's definitely easier/safer to write longer programs in other languages, but with proper discipline it's also possible to write really big, robust programs in Bash/shells--people have done this, and some of that code is probably still running today.
- Sean1708 9y ago
  > and some of that code is probably still running today. A lot of that code is still being written today, which is one of the things that OP is trying to change.

arghwhat 9y ago

This one gets it. What I want from an interactive shell is not what I want from a programming language.

solarkraft 9y ago
I wondered this while reading the article. Do we really need the same language for commands & for programming? Portability is nice, but it seems like the requirements are a bit different for one-liners vs scripts you need to maintain.

zbentley 9y ago

Well, Perl back in the bad old days (4 and earlier) was very similar in terms of limited "minimum standard" facilities, but tons of people used it as a general purpose scripting language and hacked together some really huge systems. It's definitely easier/safer to write longer programs in other languages, but with proper discipline it's also possible to write really big, robust programs in Bash/shells--people have done this, and some of that code is probably still running today.

Sean1708 9y ago
> and some of that code is probably still running today. A lot of that code is still being written today, which is one of the things that OP is trying to change.