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You can replace bash with JS. Scripting is their common application domain. Can you replace JS with bash, though? If the answer is "no," that means JS has a

by hun3 3y ago

You can replace bash with JS. Scripting is their common application domain. Can you replace JS with bash, though? If the answer is "no," that means JS has applications (e.g., servers and web clients) that bash can't be used for. And they're saying JavaScript is bad at them. Bash is arguably worse, but it's usually not an option in the first place so you don't get to complain.

mananaysiempre 3y ago
> You can replace bash with JS Noo-ot really except in a Turing-tarpit sort of way. Like it or not, once learned (!) Bourne shell together with the traditional tools is a well-designed user interface and works even better for that than, say, Tcl[1]. Not an automation or scripting language, a user interface for all daily interaction. I would absolutely hate to manually sort through my files in JS, while in shell I can often do it faster than in a GUI file manager. And, of course, it’s also a fairly strong contender as a programming language in the paradigm of many pipelined imperative processes—probably because that paradigm remains largely unexplored. I can only maybe name Icon as a viable competitor, and Icon’s also very nice. (Python, no matter how “inspired” it is by Icon, has traded its command of streams for more mainstream ease of use.) By comparison, the old complement of parallellized JS build tools (Gulp? Grunt? I forgot, it’s been a while) always surprised me with how awkwardly it accomplished shell-script-equivalent tasks. To be clear, it’s not that Bourne shell is good and JS is bad. JS is a passable Fortran[2], while shell is at best a marginally functional one—there’s a reason Awk exists. But shell competes in categories that most other languages don’t even try to qualify for. [Yes, I know about rc. I happen to think rc’s focus on one-level lists of strings (incidentally shared by Jam, an attempt at a better make) is a mistake, and more consistent arbitrarily-nested quoting, giving a “stringy Lisp” in the vein of Tcl, would be the way to go.] [1] http://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html http://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html [2] http://conal.net/blog/posts/can-functional-programming-be-liberated-from-the-von-neumann-paradigm http://conal.net/blog/posts/can-functional-programming-be-li...
- deleted 3y ago
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- hun3 3y ago
  > it’s also a fairly strong contender as a programming language in the paradigm of many pipelined imperative processes—probably because that paradigm remains largely unexplored. The paradigm is called point-free programming[1], right? I don't know how "imperative" is relevant here--you can rewrite most of the coreutils in Haskell, for example. [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_programming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_programming
- hun3 3y ago
  > Noo-ot really except in a Turing-tarpit sort of way. That means bash has applications (e.g., batch processing and file management) that JS can't be (easily) used for. And they never said bash is bad at them. That...proves my point?

by hun3 3y ago

mananaysiempre 3y ago

> You can replace bash with JS Noo-ot really except in a Turing-tarpit sort of way. Like it or not, once learned (!) Bourne shell together with the traditional tools is a well-designed user interface and works even better for that than, say, Tcl[1]. Not an automation or scripting language, a user interface for all daily interaction. I would absolutely hate to manually sort through my files in JS, while in shell I can often do it faster than in a GUI file manager. And, of course, it’s also a fairly strong contender as a programming language in the paradigm of many pipelined imperative processes—probably because that paradigm remains largely unexplored. I can only maybe name Icon as a viable competitor, and Icon’s also very nice. (Python, no matter how “inspired” it is by Icon, has traded its command of streams for more mainstream ease of use.) By comparison, the old complement of parallellized JS build tools (Gulp? Grunt? I forgot, it’s been a while) always surprised me with how awkwardly it accomplished shell-script-equivalent tasks. To be clear, it’s not that Bourne shell is good and JS is bad. JS is a passable Fortran[2], while shell is at best a marginally functional one—there’s a reason Awk exists. But shell competes in categories that most other languages don’t even try to qualify for. [Yes, I know about rc. I happen to think rc’s focus on one-level lists of strings (incidentally shared by Jam, an attempt at a better make) is a mistake, and more consistent arbitrarily-nested quoting, giving a “stringy Lisp” in the vein of Tcl, would be the way to go.] [1] http://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html http://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html [2] http://conal.net/blog/posts/can-functional-programming-be-liberated-from-the-von-neumann-paradigm http://conal.net/blog/posts/can-functional-programming-be-li...

deleted 3y ago
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hun3 3y ago
> it’s also a fairly strong contender as a programming language in the paradigm of many pipelined imperative processes—probably because that paradigm remains largely unexplored. The paradigm is called point-free programming[1], right? I don't know how "imperative" is relevant here--you can rewrite most of the coreutils in Haskell, for example. [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_programming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_programming
hun3 3y ago
> Noo-ot really except in a Turing-tarpit sort of way. That means bash has applications (e.g., batch processing and file management) that JS can't be (easily) used for. And they never said bash is bad at them. That...proves my point?