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Do you recommend any good alternative when your shell program gets too large? Honest question, as I’m struggling to leave the shell environment once the progra

• HeckFeck 3y ago
  You've some hesitation with Perl, but if you stick at it, you'll find what you seek. It feels very 'unixy' and can achieve much the same as shell while being more consistent in its syntax. Its portability means it will work the same across environments. Plus the newest editions have niceties like modern classes and try/catch as inbuilt language features. Sharing this because its the route I went, anything I'd have written in Bash I'd now do in Perl.
  • phone8675309 3y ago
    The tooling around Perl has also gotten better over the last decade or so while also allowing you to pack everything to run on even ancient machines running old Perl 5.
  • lysium 3y ago
    Thank you for encouraging me to use Perl. After Perl 6 came out I got confused at what and how to use and hence I’ve abandoned that path. I’ll try once more now.
• BoppreH 3y ago
  If it's too large, then just write normal Python code. It'll be a lot longer than the equivalent shell-like script, but you'll gain it back in maintenance effort, debugabillity, and robustness.
• mplewis 3y ago
  I use Go. You can run scripts with go run directly, and this package makes shell tasks easy: https://github.com/bitfield/script https://github.com/bitfield/script
  • lysium 3y ago
    Script looks promising, thank you! I’ll give it a try, as some sister comment also suggests Go.
• colejohnson66 3y ago
  Powershell uses proper objects instead of stringly nonsense.
• mongol 3y ago
  I once read a HN thread that recommended Go for this, and it made me interested. I think it was a useful suggestion, it made me learn Go, and I kind of agree with it, 5+ years after. It is not a shell, but it is simple and fast and useful.
• reddit_clone 3y ago
  Perl6/Raku is my personal choice (when I can). Python to me, is too far away from shell/unix. It is a programming language for writing applications. For the use case of writing shell scripts but in a more powerful language, perl is still the king here (or it should be. Sadly it doesn't appear to be the case. No one is using it except for die hard gray beards.) Raku is a modern (still a big) language with kitchen sink. Again doesn't appear to be much uptake.
• tesseract 3y ago
  Good ergonomics for Perl-style quick and dirty text processing were part of the original design goals for Ruby. Those parts of the language are still there. You can write code that feels more concise than Python yet, IMO, tends to be more readable/maintainable than Perl can stereotypically be. Modern style guides, however, de-emphasize that style of Ruby since it might not be the most appropriate in the context of say a large Rails project.
• cb321 3y ago
  On Unix, you might try Nim (https://nim-lang.org https://nim-lang.org) with https://github.com/Vindaar/shell https://github.com/Vindaar/shell and there are a slew of pipeline-y/Unix-y utilities over at https://github.com/c-blake/bu https://github.com/c-blake/bu Nim is statically typed and (generally) native-compiled, but it has very low ceremony ergonomics and a powerful compile-time macro/template system as well as user-defined operators (e.g., you can use `+-` to make a constructor for uncertain values so that `9 +- 2` builds a typed object as in https://github.com/SciNim/Measuremancer https://github.com/SciNim/Measuremancer .
  • lysium 3y ago
    Thanks for pointing me to nim, it looks promising. I‘ll try to use https://nim-lang.org/docs/osproc.html https://nim-lang.org/docs/osproc.html to pipe programs. My use case is approx. like this: I can get 80% what I want with ls … | sed … | grep -v … but then it gets complicated in the script and I’d like to replace the sed or grep part with some program.
    • cb321 3y ago
      This sounds like a job for what standard C calls "popen". You can do import posix; for line in popen("ls", "r").lines: echo line in Nim, though you obviously need to replace `echo line` with other desired processing and learn how to do that. You might also want to consider `rp` which is a program generator-compiler-runner along the lines of `awk` but with all the code just Nim snippets interpolated into a program template: https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/doc/rp.md https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/doc/rp.md . E.g.: $ ls -l | rp -pimport\ stats -bvar\ r:RunningStat -wnf\>4 r.push\ 4.f -eecho\ r RunningStat( number of probes: 26 max: 31303.0 min: 23.0 sum: 84738.0 mean: 3259.153846153846 std deviation: 6393.116633069013 )
      • lysium 3y ago
        Thank you! Popen looks like what I was looking for!
• paulddraper 3y ago
  Python. Just the inclusion of argparse alone is worth it IMO. > Python’s support for pipes was difficult Well, the idea would be to replace a lot of your pipe usage. Off the wall, but Scala has a concise syntax for process operations, but startup time is likely prohibitive.
• paddim8 3y ago
  Elk is a Shell language with syntax similar to Python. https://elk.strct.net https://elk.strct.net
  • lysium 3y ago
    This looks very interesting! Thank you!
• fho 3y ago
  Unpopular opinion, but I used Haskell "scripts" with relative success for a while. Stack has a nice script interpreter mode that is runnable in the familiar #! way. Even allows to add dependencies and if necessary compile the script on the fly.