I consider luajit a much better choice than bash if both maintainability and longterm stability are valued. It compiles from source in about 5 seconds on a seven year old laptop and only uses c99, which I expect to last basically indefinitely.
For some quality of "run", because I'm hella sure that it has quite a few serious bugs no matter what, starting from escapes or just a folder being empty/having files unlike when it was written, causing it to break in a completely unintelligible way.
python does EOL releases after 5 years. I guess versions are readily available for downloading and running with uv, but at that point you are on your own.
bash is glue and for me, glue code must survive the passage of time. The moment you use a high-level language for glue code it stops being glue code.
I don't know Ruby, but chances are that your Python/JavaScript scripts are going to run in 5 years as well, if you stick to standard library.
Just don't use any NPM libraries (if possible) and you'll be fine. I personally wouldn't use typescript for this sort of thing.
Why not? You can have bun or even node these days run it directly.
and then your mamba changes
What's that even mean
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Fair. My bash scripts only broke 3 times over the years:
- when ls started quoting filenames with spaces (add -N)
- when perl stopped being installed by default in CentOS and AlmaLinux (had to add dnf install -y perl)
- when egrep alias disappeared (use grep -E)
I consider luajit a much better choice than bash if both maintainability and longterm stability are valued. It compiles from source in about 5 seconds on a seven year old laptop and only uses c99, which I expect to last basically indefinitely.
For some quality of "run", because I'm hella sure that it has quite a few serious bugs no matter what, starting from escapes or just a folder being empty/having files unlike when it was written, causing it to break in a completely unintelligible way.
I guess we have wildly different expectatives of what a language is responsible for and what not.
Bash is not a great cross-platform choice. Too many subtle differences.
The best way is a scripting language with locked-down dependency spec inside the script. Weirdly .NET is leading the way here.
Stick to posix shell and it will run anywhere and on anything no matter how old.
>Too many subtle differences.
Such as?
This entire list: https://www.shellcheck.net/wiki/
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The tools you will call from your bash script differ in subtle ways between Linux, macOS, MinGW.
One good example is `uuidgen`
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Python with uv seems decent in here too.
python does EOL releases after 5 years. I guess versions are readily available for downloading and running with uv, but at that point you are on your own.
bash is glue and for me, glue code must survive the passage of time. The moment you use a high-level language for glue code it stops being glue code.