Fun with uv and PEP 723

finally feels like Python scripts can Just Work™ without a virtualenv scavenger hunt.

Now if only someone could do the same for shell scripts. Packaging, dependency management, and reproducibility in shell land are still stuck in the Stone Ages. Right now it’s still curl | bash and hope for the best, or a README with 12 manual steps and three missing dependencies.

Sure, there’s Nix... if you’ve already transcended time, space, and the Nix manual. Docker? Great, if downloading a Linux distro to run sed sounds reasonable.

There’s got to be a middle ground simple, declarative, and built for humans.

> Packaging, dependency management, and reproducibility in shell land are still stuck in the Stone Ages.

IMO it should stay that way, because any script that needs those things is way past the point where shell is a reasonable choice. Shell scripts should be small, 20 lines or so. The language just plain sucks too much to make it worth using for anything bigger.

When you solve the dependency management issue for shell scripts, you can also use newer language features because you can ship a newer interpreter the same way you ship whatever external dependencies you have. You don't have to limit yourself to what is POSIX, etc. Depending on how you solve it, you may even be able to switch to a newer shell with a nicer language. (And doing so may solve it for you; since PowerShell, newer shells often come with a dependency management layer.)

> any script that needs those things

It's not really a matter of needing those things, necessarily. Once you have them, you're welcome to write scripts in a cleaner, more convenient way. For instance, all of my shell scripts used by colleagues at work just use GNU coreutils regardless of what platform they're on. Instead of worrying about differences in how sed behaves with certain flags, on different platforms, I simply write everything for GNU sed and it Just Works™. Do those scripts need such a thing? Not necessarily. Is it nicer to write free of constraints like that? Yes!

Same thing for just choosing commands with nicer interfaces, or more unified syntax... Use p7zip for handling all your archives so there's only one interface to think about. Make heavy use of `jq` (a great language) for dealing with structured data. Don't worry about reading input from a file and then writing back to it in the same pipeline; just throw in `sponge` from moreutils.

> The language just plain sucks too much

There really isn't anything better for invoking external programs. Everything else is way clunkier. Maybe that's okay, but when I've rewritten large-ish shell scripts in other languages, I often found myself annoyed with the new language. What used to be a 20-line shell script can easily end up being 400 lines in a "real" language.

I kind of agree with you, of course. POSIX-ish shells have too much syntax and at the same time not enough power. But what I really want is a better shell language, not to use some interpreted non-shell language in their place.

Nice, if only you could count on having it installed on your fleet, and your fleet is 100pct Linux, no AIX, no HPUX, no SOLARIS, no SUSE on IBM Power....

Been there, tried to, got a huge slap in the face.