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To be fair, that same argument could be made against any new programming language designed to replace an old, firmly entrenched one.
by wavemode 3y ago
To be fair, that same argument could be made against any new programming language designed to replace an old, firmly entrenched one.
- kuchenbecker 3y agoAnd it is, I use that argument regularly when people want to spin up a new project in a new language when the tooling doesn't support the new language and it's an uphill battle to make it work.
- wavemode 3y agoNo, "lack of good tooling" is a completely different argument. The argument put forth by the comment I replied to is that there is basically no point learning a new language, because to work with existing code you still have to know the old language. Which I think is a massive fallacy. Yes, Kotlin programmers still have to understand Java to be effective. That doesn't make Kotlin useless.
- theamk 3y agoShell is pretty special though - it is a very frequent secondary language. In fact, even Kotlin itself uses bash: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/master/scripts/build-kotlin-maven.sh https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/master/scripts/buil... So sure, replace Java with Kotlin, C++ with Rust, Python with go/julia/ruby/whatever.. but bash or sh is here to stay. (And that would be bash or sh, not fish or nushell or something...)
- theamk 3y agoSure, and that's why Zig or D are not in the any of the top 10 lists. You have to get a lot benefits to justify switching to a new default against the current critical mass. (and this is especially true for shells: a large number of code is written in sh because it's assumed to be installed on all users' systems; so unless so many software starts requiring "fish" that it gets into default system install, we'll be seeing sh for a long, long time)