Comment by HackerThemAll
8 hours ago
> bash's syntax is so weird
What should be the syntax according to contemporary IT people? JSON? YAML? Or just LLM prompt?
8 hours ago
> bash's syntax is so weird
What should be the syntax according to contemporary IT people? JSON? YAML? Or just LLM prompt?
Nushell, Powershell, Python, Ruby, heck even Perl is better. Shell scripting is literally the worst language I've ever seen in common use. Any realistic alternative is going to be better.
It always exists on any Unix system. Even a busybox root environment. Why do you want to save a few bytes to compromise portability?
But it isn't portable, unless you stick to posix subset which kinda sucks. You'll use some feature that some dude using an ancient shell doesn't have then he'll complain to you. And that list of features is LONG: https://oneuptime.com/blog/post/2026-02-13-posix-shell-compa...
If you're using shell specific features in a tightly controlled environment like a docker container then yeah, go wild. If you're writing a script for personal use, sure. If you're writing something for other people to run then your code will be working around all the missing features posix hasn't been updated to include. You can't use arrays, or arithmetic context, nothing. It sucks to use.
Besides, if you're writing a script it is likely that it will grow, get more complicated, and you will soon bump up against the limitations of the language and have to do truly horrible workarounds.
This is why if I need something for others to run then I just use python from the beginning. The code will be easier to read and more portable. At this point the vast majority of OS's and images have it available anyway so it's not as big a barrier as it used to be.
Nushell! Or powershell, but I much prefer nushell!
There's a movement to write JSON to fd 3, as a machine-parsable alternative to rickety fd 1.
Anything that is infected by UCS-2 / UTF-16 garbage should be revised and reconsidered... Yeah UTF-8 has carve outs for those escape sequences... However JSON is even worse, you _have_ to use UTF-16 escapes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON#Character_encoding
Trying to be language agnostic: it should be as self-explanatory as possible. 2>&1 is all but.
Why is there a 2 on the left, when the numbers are usually on the right. What's the relationship between 2 and 1? Is the 2 for std err? Is that `&` to mean "reference"? The fact you only grok it if you know POSIX sys calls means it's far from self explanatory. And given the proportion of people that know POSIX sys calls among those that use Bash, I think it's a bit of an elitist syntax.
POSIX has a manual for shell. You can read 99% of it without needing to know any syscalls. I'm not as familiar with it but Bash has an extensive manual as well, and I doubt syscall knowledge is particularly required there either.
If your complaint is "I don't know what this syntax means without reading the manual" I'd like to point you to any contemporary language that has things like arrow functions, or operator overloading, or magic methods, or monkey patching.
Haskell
Honestly, Python with the "sh" module is a lot more sane.
Is it more sane, or is it just what you are used to?
Python doesn't really have much that makes it a sensible choice for scripting.
Its got some basic data structures and a std-lib, but it comes at a non-trivial performance cost, a massive barrier to getting out of the single thread, and non-trivial overhead when managing downstream processes. It doesn't protect you from any runtime errors (no types, no compile checks). And I wouldn't call python in practice particularly portable...
Laughably, NodeJS is genuinely a better choice - while you don't get multithreading easily, at least you aren't trivially blocked on IO. NodeJS also has pretty great compatibility for portability; and can be easily compiled/transformed to get your types and compile checks if you want. I'd still rather avoid managing downstream processes with it - but at least you know your JSON parsing and manipulation is trivial.
Go is my goto when I'm reaching for more; but (ba)sh is king. You're scripting on the shell because you're mainly gluing other processes together, and this is what (ba)sh is designed to do. There is a learning curve, and there are footguns.