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The thing is about the shell is that it can't really be a brand new language. The shell derives its power directly from the OS and the OS needs the shell to pr
by Goladus 15y ago
The thing is about the shell is that it can't really be a brand new language. The shell derives its power directly from the OS and the OS needs the shell to provide much of that power. They almost have to evolve together.
Also, bash syntax seems a lot less clumsy once you grok unix stuff like pipes, exit codes, and argument parsing (which you should really do anyway before scripting unix in any language). The fundamental abstraction is the command + argument list, and many quirks clearly derive from the syntax trying to stay out of the way of executing commands and gathering the results.
- 1amzave 15y ago> The shell derives its power directly from the OS Indeed. After using it for quite some time without really thinking about it much, I've only relatively recently come to the realization that the shell is, in many ways, simply a thin very UI layer wrapped around the kernel's syscall API, and I think the awesome utility of the shell speaks to the quality of the design of that API.
- Dobbs 15y agoThe shell's name is derived from the fact that it was a wrapper around the kernel.