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The thing that gets me about all the new shells and shell scripting languages popping up these days is they loosely seem to fall into 2 categories: 1. more emp

The thing that gets me about all the new shells and shell scripting languages popping up these days is they loosely seem to fall into 2 categories: 1. more emphasis traditional programming paradigms (be it JS, LISP, Python, whatever) which leaves a platform that is arguably a better designed language but however is a poorer REPL environment for it. Bash works because it's terse and terseness is actually preferable for "write many, read once" style environments like an interactive command prompt. 2. or they spend so much effort supporting POSIX/Bash -- including their warts -- that they end up poorer scripting languages. I think what we really need isn't to rewrite all our shell scripts in Python but rather better shells. Ones which work with existing muscle memory but isn't afraid to break compatibility for the sake of eliminating a few footguns. Shells that can straddle both the aforementioned objectives without sacrificing the other. But there doesn't seem to be many people trying this (I can only think of a couple off hand).

jhasse 7y ago
What are your thoughts about fish?
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  Does fish still have the issue where pipelines aren’t really concurrent?
fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
If you haven’t tried scripting in zsh, I’d give it a go. zsh has a lot of safety improvements and quality of life features. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22029662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22029662
- laumars 7y ago
  It's also subject to many of the same footguns as Bash so I'd put that into the 2nd camp (re my previous post). Not that I'm taking anything away from zsh. It is a nice shell. But I think we can do even better considering how dependant we still are on shells for day to day stuff.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
    I realize that it has similar footguns, however reading through their info pages, I was surprised by how many they just decided to fix, unless you explicitly turn on compatibility mode.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
    > Zsh had arrays from the start, and its author opted for a saner language design at the expense of backward compatibility. In zsh (under the default expansion rules) $var does not perfom word splitting; if you want to store a list of words in a variable, you are meant to use an array; and if you really want word splitting, you can write $=var. https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/26672 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/26672
lukeschlather 7y ago
I've been writing a lot of Powershell lately, and my only real gripe with it is that it seems suspiciously like not being Posix compliant in any way was a design goal. I agree with the idea of breaking backwards compatibility, but Powershell honestly has enough core design issues that it itself is starting to feel like it needs a major backwards-incompatible update.
- leosarev 7y ago
  Major backwards-incompatible update have come recently (Powershell Core).
  - nailer 7y ago
    What did they break? Powershell core just doesn't include Win32, but that's fine, it runs on Linux and macOS and they don't need Win32. Powershell 7 has a full Win32.
    - leosarev 7y ago
      I.e. curl command now means actual curl, not Invoke-webrequest

jhasse 7y ago

What are your thoughts about fish?

fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
Does fish still have the issue where pipelines aren’t really concurrent?

fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago

If you haven’t tried scripting in zsh, I’d give it a go. zsh has a lot of safety improvements and quality of life features. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22029662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22029662

laumars 7y ago
It's also subject to many of the same footguns as Bash so I'd put that into the 2nd camp (re my previous post). Not that I'm taking anything away from zsh. It is a nice shell. But I think we can do even better considering how dependant we still are on shells for day to day stuff.
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  I realize that it has similar footguns, however reading through their info pages, I was surprised by how many they just decided to fix, unless you explicitly turn on compatibility mode.
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  > Zsh had arrays from the start, and its author opted for a saner language design at the expense of backward compatibility. In zsh (under the default expansion rules) $var does not perfom word splitting; if you want to store a list of words in a variable, you are meant to use an array; and if you really want word splitting, you can write $=var. https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/26672 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/26672

lukeschlather 7y ago

I've been writing a lot of Powershell lately, and my only real gripe with it is that it seems suspiciously like not being Posix compliant in any way was a design goal. I agree with the idea of breaking backwards compatibility, but Powershell honestly has enough core design issues that it itself is starting to feel like it needs a major backwards-incompatible update.

leosarev 7y ago
Major backwards-incompatible update have come recently (Powershell Core).
- nailer 7y ago
  What did they break? Powershell core just doesn't include Win32, but that's fine, it runs on Linux and macOS and they don't need Win32. Powershell 7 has a full Win32.
  - leosarev 7y ago
    I.e. curl command now means actual curl, not Invoke-webrequest