3 ms·

My initial thought after seeing this is Windows support is interesting, but the real value is in making bash friendlier. Something that brings syntactic sugar t

My initial thought after seeing this is Windows support is interesting, but the real value is in making bash friendlier. Something that brings syntactic sugar to bash is welcome in my mind, as I always find myself putzing with Google to find solutions to even slightly non-trivial scripts. Perhaps I should just master bash scripting once and for all (I know it's not that complex), but I generally find it unpleasant to do anything that requires control flow or traditional "programming language logic" in bash. A simple way to bootstrap the compiler with the script itself would be especially nice. Basically, an embedded batsh compiler. Might be an interesting avenue for an enterprising person to look into.

XorNot 12y ago
Use Python? Most of the time I find myself struggling with Bash, it's because a simple script has kept expanding in scope and I'm well into the sunk-cost fallacy in trying to fix "just that one last thing". But unless you have a really specific environment, I'm pretty sure most modern servers probably have Python or Ruby or some other stack that can be a shell script available. If you're in Bash, it's because you were trying to do something quickly.
- reledi 12y ago
  General rule of thumb for me is if it exceeds 100 lines of Bash, it should probably be a Ruby or Python script.
mtdewcmu 12y ago
>> A simple way to bootstrap the compiler with the script itself would be especially nice. Basically, an embedded batsh compiler. Might be an interesting avenue for an enterprising person to look into. This could be very easy. If this can't be rigged with simple shell scripting (in a reasonable way), then it could with straightforward changes to the compiler (such as outputting to standard output). If you don't mind doing somewhat silly things like writing out scripts as temp files, this could certainly be done now.

XorNot 12y ago

Use Python? Most of the time I find myself struggling with Bash, it's because a simple script has kept expanding in scope and I'm well into the sunk-cost fallacy in trying to fix "just that one last thing". But unless you have a really specific environment, I'm pretty sure most modern servers probably have Python or Ruby or some other stack that can be a shell script available. If you're in Bash, it's because you were trying to do something quickly.

reledi 12y ago
General rule of thumb for me is if it exceeds 100 lines of Bash, it should probably be a Ruby or Python script.

mtdewcmu 12y ago

>> A simple way to bootstrap the compiler with the script itself would be especially nice. Basically, an embedded batsh compiler. Might be an interesting avenue for an enterprising person to look into. This could be very easy. If this can't be rigged with simple shell scripting (in a reasonable way), then it could with straightforward changes to the compiler (such as outputting to standard output). If you don't mind doing somewhat silly things like writing out scripts as temp files, this could certainly be done now.