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Serious question: Who is the target audience of Nushell? I know for a fact that I couldn't get someone like my parents or my girlfriend to use something like th

Serious question: Who is the target audience of Nushell? I know for a fact that I couldn't get someone like my parents or my girlfriend to use something like that day to day, and if you need a shell to work more efficiently, why not just learn bash? The learning curve for the 2 seems pretty much exactly the same, and bash has the benefit of being installed on almost every Linux/Unix system, even Macs (I think they actually use zsh now, but still)

southerntofu 5y ago
> I know for a fact that I couldn't get someone (...) to use something like that day to day I know for a fact the opposite is true for me. A simple shell syntax with an amazing documentation is all it takes for people to write useful scripts. I'm confident i can teach basic programming to a total newbie using a structured shell in a few minutes. Explaining quirks of conditionals and loops in usual shells is trickier: should i use "-eq" or "=" or "=="? why am i iterating over a non-matching globset? etc. > why not just learn bash? I have a love-hate relationship with bash. It's good, but full of inconsistencies, and writing reliable, fail-safe scripts is really hard. I much prefer a language in which i'm less productive, but doesn't take me hours of debugging every time i'm reaching an edge case. Also, bash has very little embedded tooling, compared to nushell. In many cases, you have to learn more tools (languages) like awk, jq. In nushell, such features are built-in. > being installed on almost every Linux/Unix system Well, bash is definitely very portable. But at this game, nothing can beat a standard POSIX /bin/sh. Who knows? It may outlive us all :)
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> Who is the target audience of Nushell? People who a) are trying to escape from the insanity of traditional shells and use something that works with structured data, and b) want something other than PowerShell.

southerntofu 5y ago

> I know for a fact that I couldn't get someone (...) to use something like that day to day I know for a fact the opposite is true for me. A simple shell syntax with an amazing documentation is all it takes for people to write useful scripts. I'm confident i can teach basic programming to a total newbie using a structured shell in a few minutes. Explaining quirks of conditionals and loops in usual shells is trickier: should i use "-eq" or "=" or "=="? why am i iterating over a non-matching globset? etc. > why not just learn bash? I have a love-hate relationship with bash. It's good, but full of inconsistencies, and writing reliable, fail-safe scripts is really hard. I much prefer a language in which i'm less productive, but doesn't take me hours of debugging every time i'm reaching an edge case. Also, bash has very little embedded tooling, compared to nushell. In many cases, you have to learn more tools (languages) like awk, jq. In nushell, such features are built-in. > being installed on almost every Linux/Unix system Well, bash is definitely very portable. But at this game, nothing can beat a standard POSIX /bin/sh. Who knows? It may outlive us all :)

TeMPOraL 5y ago

> Who is the target audience of Nushell? People who a) are trying to escape from the insanity of traditional shells and use something that works with structured data, and b) want something other than PowerShell.