8 ms·

The advertisement promises a combination of bash and lisp. So it makes me wonder -- why couldn't we just use lisp? What are the affordances needed for a "scrip

The advertisement promises a combination of bash and lisp. So it makes me wonder -- why couldn't we just use lisp? What are the affordances needed for a "scripting" language (or for interactive use) vis-a-vis more "production use? Is it just about having minimal boilerplate, and a large corpus of ready-to-use functions in the namespace?

Kinrany 2y ago
Process composition is one thing that shell languages do better than traditional programming languages
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  There’s plenty of LISP packages that support process composition. Also LISPs syntax better suits write once type environments like REPL shells than your average C-derived syntax.
  - Kinrany 2y ago
    Any examples? Searching for this is hard. What would `foo | bar | baz` look like in a lisp?
    - christophilus 2y ago
      Something like Clojure’s threading macro, probably: (-> (foo) (bar) (baz))
slowmovintarget 2y ago
https://github.com/babashka/babashka https://github.com/babashka/babashka Granted, if you're saying why can't we have the shell also... well, now you're talking about Emacs.
jimbokun 2y ago
Maybe the ultimate would be default to bash but if you start a command with a prefix everything following is parsed and evaluated as an s-expression.
- toolslive 2y ago
  ipython is the complete opposite: python but enhanced with bash. For example: x = !ls # capture the output of `ls` into x x[0] # the first filename ...
jerf 2y ago
"Is it just about having minimal boilerplate" That's a lot of it, but I think people don't realize how every keystroke counts with shell. There's only a handful of languages where the "apply function" operator is space. Shell is one of them. (Haskell & Forth are the other two I know off the top of my head, possibly Factor (concatenative in general tends this way).) Most new shells that are successful copy this. I don't think that's a coincidence. Lisp's abundance of parens is something that people will have trouble with, even Lisp programmers, because this is not the usual whining about a foreign language paradigm and not being used to reading parens... this is literally about the effort required to physically enter them with a keyboard.
- tom_ 2y ago
  Regarding minimal syntax: https://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html https://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html
  - jerf 2y ago
    Yeah, it really is like that. I've tried a couple of times to switch to things like IPython as my shell. And what nukes it every time is that while it may be better at the complicated commands I run maybe 1% of the time if you actually look at an unmodified history, cd("some dir") is just too much insanely harder than cd som TAB ENTER and I'm just smashing that TAB in a tight interactive loop to figure out how little I need to type. It doesn't look like it when you're doing it once, but when you're doing it dozens of times a minute it adds up fast.
solidsnack9000 2y ago
In addition to "space is function application" another important shell affordance seems to be "words are just words" -- you don't have to quote simple strings like `README.md`. If you want a single string with more than one word (where there is a space in between), that is in conflict with "space is function application", so then you have to put it in quotes.

Kinrany 2y ago

Process composition is one thing that shell languages do better than traditional programming languages

hnlmorg 2y ago
There’s plenty of LISP packages that support process composition. Also LISPs syntax better suits write once type environments like REPL shells than your average C-derived syntax.
- Kinrany 2y ago
  Any examples? Searching for this is hard. What would `foo | bar | baz` look like in a lisp?
  - christophilus 2y ago
    Something like Clojure’s threading macro, probably: (-> (foo) (bar) (baz))

slowmovintarget 2y ago

https://github.com/babashka/babashka https://github.com/babashka/babashka Granted, if you're saying why can't we have the shell also... well, now you're talking about Emacs.

jimbokun 2y ago

Maybe the ultimate would be default to bash but if you start a command with a prefix everything following is parsed and evaluated as an s-expression.

toolslive 2y ago
ipython is the complete opposite: python but enhanced with bash. For example: x = !ls # capture the output of `ls` into x x[0] # the first filename ...

jerf 2y ago

"Is it just about having minimal boilerplate" That's a lot of it, but I think people don't realize how every keystroke counts with shell. There's only a handful of languages where the "apply function" operator is space. Shell is one of them. (Haskell & Forth are the other two I know off the top of my head, possibly Factor (concatenative in general tends this way).) Most new shells that are successful copy this. I don't think that's a coincidence. Lisp's abundance of parens is something that people will have trouble with, even Lisp programmers, because this is not the usual whining about a foreign language paradigm and not being used to reading parens... this is literally about the effort required to physically enter them with a keyboard.

tom_ 2y ago
Regarding minimal syntax: https://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html https://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html
- jerf 2y ago
  Yeah, it really is like that. I've tried a couple of times to switch to things like IPython as my shell. And what nukes it every time is that while it may be better at the complicated commands I run maybe 1% of the time if you actually look at an unmodified history, cd("some dir") is just too much insanely harder than cd som TAB ENTER and I'm just smashing that TAB in a tight interactive loop to figure out how little I need to type. It doesn't look like it when you're doing it once, but when you're doing it dozens of times a minute it adds up fast.

solidsnack9000 2y ago

In addition to "space is function application" another important shell affordance seems to be "words are just words" -- you don't have to quote simple strings like `README.md`. If you want a single string with more than one word (where there is a space in between), that is in conflict with "space is function application", so then you have to put it in quotes.