Comment by matheusmoreira
1 day ago
> 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.
I struggle with this too. On the plus side, the devil you know is often better than the devil you don't know, and anything new will require re-learning a lifetime's worth of muscle memory. It's also nice to know that your bash scripts are going to be hyper-portable and will still work even many years later. The muscle memory is also real. However it isn't great to be constrained with unsightly code for sake of extreme backwards compatibility. I've found a nice balance personally where I use ruby if I need anything that bash isn't good at, but it's never a perfectly clean split.
2 replies →
Sorry, which library feature?
1 reply →
... 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.
I might be in a minority, but I actually prefer fish as an interactive shell and bash (or plain /bin/sh) for scripting, if anything because that's what I'm used to :), and it's portable
3 replies →
Many have succeeded writing functional alternative shells for sure, but none have replaced bash at any meaningful scale.
1 reply →
>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?
No help here. I daily drive fish, and subscribe to the philosophy that more than 5 lines of bash is probably a mistake. That being said, I still run into bash everywhere and wish that there was a more robust default installed already. Something which did not require pathological monitoring by shellcheck.
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?