3 ms·
The supremacy of bash over zsh &c. seems to be an excellent case study in the "Worse is Better" hypothesis. http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://
by RyanMcGreal 15y ago
The supremacy of bash over zsh &c. seems to be an excellent case study in the "Worse is Better" hypothesis.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
- Symmetry 15y agoNot really, you're not seeing bash have many more features because its simpler on the inside at the cost of sometimes breaking. Rather, it seems an example of " the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough"
- justincormack 15y agoNot sure that is the real reason. Zsh was not free software in the Linux formative years. It lost its chance, and mindshare, like so much commercial Unix
- recoil 15y agoZsh was never part of a commercial Unix, so I suspect you are thinking of Ksh. As far as I can tell, Zsh has always been free software: the earliest version I could find used the GPL, but it now uses something more MIT-like. Bash is probably more widely used because it was available earlier than Zsh, and because it was the "official" shell of the GNU project (better marketing).