Comment by freedomben
1 day ago
I'm simultaneously amazed and horrified (by the strange but amazing love child you've created between bash and ruby). I spent years (nearly a decade) trying to blend ruby and bash to make the perfect shell, and after never being quite satisfied, I eventually gave up and embraced bash. This does get closer/further than I ever could, and is a fascinating project. I'm going to give it a spin, though I can already imagine the biggest obstacle I'll hit: rubish not being available in the remote environments I need it to, meaning I'll either have to install it (and it's not lightweight currently), or I'll have to live in two different worlds, which isn't usually sustainable.
Kudos though, and great work! I can tell you put a lot of thought and effort into it.
> I can already imagine the biggest obstacle I'll hit: rubish not being available in the remote environments I need it to
The ubiquitousness of bash is among the few reasons why it continues to endure. It will be eternal if nobody tries to replace it.
Many, many people have tried...
Yeah. I will probably join their ranks at some point.
Bash maintainer actually implemented the library feature I suggested and it's already dramatically cut down the amount of unsightly bash code I need to keep around and maintain.
I'm getting pretty tired of coping with old stuff just because it's there though. Went through this phase with GNU make too.
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... and many also have succeeded. fish would not be as popular as it is otherwise, other alternative shells that break bash compatibility are being worked on and are gaining traction, elvish, nushell, murex...
mixing shells is not as hard as some people claim. it's like switching programming languages. i do that all the time. but then, i avoid bash scripting as much as i can (or shell scripting in general). if you actually enjoy bash scripting then switching may be harder.
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>The ubiquitousness of
and here I was thinking ubiquity was ubiquitous for this concept
>ubiquity of bash is among the few reasons...
I guess I'm getting older than I thought, I feel uneasy pangs every time I use a bashism because /bin/sh is the ubiquitous one.
I am deeply hopeful that Oil Shell (now just Oils) will get embraced by a big distro as the standard shell at some point. The lowest friction migration I see available while still offering a bunch of improvements.
https://oils.pub/
I was excited for this years ago, but when I tried it about 2 years ago, it felt awkward. Is it different now?
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I've used bash for 20+ years. I've tried so many other shells but always go back to bash. Thanks Brian!
Why do you always come back?
I had a very similar reaction.
I went the same way with simply bumping up my bash skills.
Part of me feels like I'd prefer pry loaded with a library that provides shell like methods for doing ruby-esque things.