5 ms·

I don't know fish, but I don't consider zsh a step in the right direction, as it tries to be just a cleaned up Bash, which is not enough. There is a general pr

I don't know fish, but I don't consider zsh a step in the right direction, as it tries to be just a cleaned up Bash, which is not enough. There is a general problem in the fact that a radical evolution of glue languages wouldn't be popular because devs rather use Python, and small evolutions wouldn't be popular (ie. zsh), because they end up being confusing (since they're still close to Bash) and not bringing significant advantages. I'm curious why there haven't been attempts to write a modern glue language (mind that languages like Python don't fit this class). I guess that Powershell (which I don't know, though) has been the only attempt.

rscho 4y ago
Oilshell is attempting new stuff, though.
Beltalowda 4y ago
zsh is not a "cleaned-up bash"; it's more of a clone of ksh (closed source at the time), with some csh features added in, as well as their own inventions. bash and zsh appeared at roughly the same time, many features were added in zsh first and added to bash later (sometimes much later, and often never). This is kind of a good example of what I meant when people conflate "bash" with "shell". As for your larger point: I kind of agree, but I think what zsh offers is the advantages of shell scripts with compatibility with existing scripts while still improving on it. That said, I believe oil also offers compatibility, but I haven't had the chance to look deeply in to it; just haven't had the time, and wanted to wait until it's stable (maybe it is now?) Perl was initially invented as the "modern glue language" to replace shell. It's fallen a bit out of fashion these days though, and to be honest I never cared all that much for Perl myself either. Raku looks nice though. TCL also works well as a kind of "glue language", although it has some really odd behaviour at times due to everything being a string and I know some people hate it with a passion, but it always worked fairly well for me. But that has also fallen out of fashion. I've also been told PowerShell is actually quite nice and has interesting concepts (and now also open source, and you can run it on e.g. Linux), but I could never get over the verbosity of it all. I'm an old unix greybeard and I want my obscure abbreviations dammit!
- shifto 4y ago
  Just so you know. You can abbreviate almost anything in powershell or make your won aliases. I love Powershell, hands down best investment in my personal career was to really learn and understand Powershell.
- papascrubs 4y ago
  The verbosity of PowerShell is overstated I think. You easily make POSH look as gnarly and esoteric as Bash if you so desire. That said, the majority of heavy lifting in POSH is done via methods these days (vs cmdlets). Your initial API query to snag the JSON might be via a cmdlet, but after that, you're slicing and dicing with real data structures. You can interact with them without having worry about whitespace or structure (meaning complex loops can easily be written on the command line without worrying about indentation). It's a little more wordy if you're use to C or Bash. But hands down it's one of my favorite languages for slicing dicing data. No need for 3rd party libraries or binaries. No need to learn a bunch of weird awk/jq syntax which is only useful for those two tools (yay, lets learn 3 language instead one?). Plus, most of the structure translates over to C#, and you can integrate C# code directly into your POSH code if desired, as well as access pretty much any low level C# methods directly. Working with strings? Pretty much any/every tool you could want to slice and dice strings. The POSH REPL is amazing. You have far more flexibility around interacting with the command line than you do with Python. It's both a shell and a true language. As with any language, there are ISMs, but far fewer footguns than any other language I've spun up. Cross platform as well with 6.0+ Intellisense ON the commandline (did I mention the awesome REPL?). Hands down one of the best built-in parameter/args/help parsing I've encountered across any language. Debugging? Amazing in vscode. And can be done strictly from the commandline as well (dynamic breakpoints? You've got it, drop you right into your catch block with an interactive shell so you can see the current status of any/all variables and manipulate them live and resume if desired) Okay, I'm done shilling for POSH. It's hands down one of my favorite shells/languages for doing POC work, or writing utility functions. Treat it more like Python than bash. But realize that you can easily use that Pythonic-esque code right inside your shell.
  - replwoacause 4y ago
naniwaduni 4y ago
zsh is, historically, a step from csh-like interactive shells in the direction of Bourne/ksh compatibility. It's easy to get the impression that zsh is a newer development than bash, but they're actually contemporary—bash rode on the popularity of GNU in the 90s, despite being a "small evolution" (frankly, a step back) compared to the ksh lineage.
- alwillis 4y ago
  It certainly didn’t hurt the popularity of Bash by having it be the default shell on tens of millions of Macs for so many years. I’m aware that ZSH has been the default shell since Catalina. Started using fish a month ago and really liking it.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    tcsh was the default shell before that, and it didn't help much with its popularity, and for interactive usage tcsh can do most of the things bash can and is mostly okay (not scripting though). I think being the de-facto default on Linux as part of "GNU plus Linux" has more to do with it.
  - yourad_io 4y ago
    Make sure you check out abbreviations Like aliases but they expand in-place, so auto completion friendly, easily modifiable, etc. Love them $ abbr s sudo $ s<space> -> sudo

rscho 4y ago

Oilshell is attempting new stuff, though.

Beltalowda 4y ago

zsh is not a "cleaned-up bash"; it's more of a clone of ksh (closed source at the time), with some csh features added in, as well as their own inventions. bash and zsh appeared at roughly the same time, many features were added in zsh first and added to bash later (sometimes much later, and often never). This is kind of a good example of what I meant when people conflate "bash" with "shell". As for your larger point: I kind of agree, but I think what zsh offers is the advantages of shell scripts with compatibility with existing scripts while still improving on it. That said, I believe oil also offers compatibility, but I haven't had the chance to look deeply in to it; just haven't had the time, and wanted to wait until it's stable (maybe it is now?) Perl was initially invented as the "modern glue language" to replace shell. It's fallen a bit out of fashion these days though, and to be honest I never cared all that much for Perl myself either. Raku looks nice though. TCL also works well as a kind of "glue language", although it has some really odd behaviour at times due to everything being a string and I know some people hate it with a passion, but it always worked fairly well for me. But that has also fallen out of fashion. I've also been told PowerShell is actually quite nice and has interesting concepts (and now also open source, and you can run it on e.g. Linux), but I could never get over the verbosity of it all. I'm an old unix greybeard and I want my obscure abbreviations dammit!

shifto 4y ago
Just so you know. You can abbreviate almost anything in powershell or make your won aliases. I love Powershell, hands down best investment in my personal career was to really learn and understand Powershell.
papascrubs 4y ago
The verbosity of PowerShell is overstated I think. You easily make POSH look as gnarly and esoteric as Bash if you so desire. That said, the majority of heavy lifting in POSH is done via methods these days (vs cmdlets). Your initial API query to snag the JSON might be via a cmdlet, but after that, you're slicing and dicing with real data structures. You can interact with them without having worry about whitespace or structure (meaning complex loops can easily be written on the command line without worrying about indentation). It's a little more wordy if you're use to C or Bash. But hands down it's one of my favorite languages for slicing dicing data. No need for 3rd party libraries or binaries. No need to learn a bunch of weird awk/jq syntax which is only useful for those two tools (yay, lets learn 3 language instead one?). Plus, most of the structure translates over to C#, and you can integrate C# code directly into your POSH code if desired, as well as access pretty much any low level C# methods directly. Working with strings? Pretty much any/every tool you could want to slice and dice strings. The POSH REPL is amazing. You have far more flexibility around interacting with the command line than you do with Python. It's both a shell and a true language. As with any language, there are ISMs, but far fewer footguns than any other language I've spun up. Cross platform as well with 6.0+ Intellisense ON the commandline (did I mention the awesome REPL?). Hands down one of the best built-in parameter/args/help parsing I've encountered across any language. Debugging? Amazing in vscode. And can be done strictly from the commandline as well (dynamic breakpoints? You've got it, drop you right into your catch block with an interactive shell so you can see the current status of any/all variables and manipulate them live and resume if desired) Okay, I'm done shilling for POSH. It's hands down one of my favorite shells/languages for doing POC work, or writing utility functions. Treat it more like Python than bash. But realize that you can easily use that Pythonic-esque code right inside your shell.
- replwoacause 4y ago

naniwaduni 4y ago

zsh is, historically, a step from csh-like interactive shells in the direction of Bourne/ksh compatibility. It's easy to get the impression that zsh is a newer development than bash, but they're actually contemporary—bash rode on the popularity of GNU in the 90s, despite being a "small evolution" (frankly, a step back) compared to the ksh lineage.

alwillis 4y ago
It certainly didn’t hurt the popularity of Bash by having it be the default shell on tens of millions of Macs for so many years. I’m aware that ZSH has been the default shell since Catalina. Started using fish a month ago and really liking it.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  tcsh was the default shell before that, and it didn't help much with its popularity, and for interactive usage tcsh can do most of the things bash can and is mostly okay (not scripting though). I think being the de-facto default on Linux as part of "GNU plus Linux" has more to do with it.
- yourad_io 4y ago
  Make sure you check out abbreviations Like aliases but they expand in-place, so auto completion friendly, easily modifiable, etc. Love them $ abbr s sudo $ s<space> -> sudo