Comment by kelnos
3 days ago
I wonder if this is a case of "worse is better", or just the long-term entrenchment of text. Because nushell hasn't been adopted all that much compared to bash or even zsh (or a "real" scripting language like python or ruby). I don't know much about PowerShell adoption (haven't used Windows in over 20 years), but I'd assume since it's a first-party system that's default installed(?), it's done better adoption-wise.
I agree that bash sucks, but I really have no motivation to learn something like nushell. I can get by with bash for simpler things, and when I get frustrated with bash, I switch to python, which is default-available everywhere I personally need it to be.
Back to text, though... I'm honestly not sure objects are strictly better than dumb text. Objects means higher cognitive overhead; text is... well, text. You can see it right there in front of you, count lines and characters, see its delimiters and structure, and come up with code to manipulate it. And, again, if I need objects, I have python.
I get the point of "either Bash or straight to a real programming language". That's what I do too, for automation. I like how PowerShell makes one-off tasks easier which would otherwise be the typical pipe of cat, grep, sed, awk etc.
About objects vs. text: I'm convinced that objects are vastly superior. There was a comment about this here with good arguments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907248