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What's with the Bash replacements?

1 points by RhysU ↗ HN
There are a gazillion posts about Bash replacements recently. Why?

I trust that you know how to make coffee. I don't care if it's drip, French press, Keurig, etc. I know that you will come to work with all the caffeine that you need.

Maybe we should geek out on beans sometimes but seriously why micro-optimize on beans? They're a means not an end.

Similarly, shell is (to crib off Cyc) the whitespace not the content. There's no there there. We might as well discuss 86 vs 87 octane or the size of a shipping container.

2 comments

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JNRowe
I think chubot presents a pretty good reasoning in his documentation for oil¹. Basically I think it comes down to there being a lot of problems with bash scripts, but the currently alternatives to bash just introduce a different set of problems. With luck maybe one of the new ones will find the sweet spot, but we won't find out without people trying.

Still, if bash works for you keep using bash ;)

¹ https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/why-a-new-shell.html

eternityforest
I'm not exactly sure. I use xonsh, but pretty much exclusively because it has better autocomplete and can serve as a calculator(Type 4 *3 in bash and it won't work without some calc command). For actual scripts, I use bash.

But then again, I don't write shell scripts. I might have a 5 line logic free script here and there, but pipes and variables and loops and globs are not a regular fixture in my life.

I just move straight to Python if I want to program something, and I almost never have any need for a quick ad hoc script.

But some people do real work in shell. And they like to program interactively.

And bash is not the nicest language. I don't think any shell is that great, they all make compromises trying to be both a UI and a language, but bash is especially not great.

I wonder if the people who like shell in general would like a FORTH based shell.