Comment by kh_hk

13 days ago

Well, at least I will be able to run my bash scripts in 5 years

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.

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.

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.

  • 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.

  • Hard disagree... I find that Deno shebangs and using fixed version dependencies to be REALLY reliable... I mean Deno 3 may come along and some internals may break, but that should have really limited side effects.

    Aside: I am somewhat disappointed that the @std guys don't (re)implement some of the bits that are part of Deno or node compatibility in a consistent way, as it would/could/should be more stable over time.

    I like Deno/TS slightly more because my package/library and version can be called directly in the script I'm executing, not a separate .csproj file.

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.