Tools: Code Is All You Need

Unpopular Opinion: I hate Bash. Hate it. And hate the ecosystem of Unix CLIs that are from the 80s and have the most obtuse, inscrutable APIs ever designed. Also this ecosystem doesn’t work on Windows — which, as a game dev, is my primary environment. And no, WSL does not count.

I don’t think the world needs yet another shell scripting language. They’re all pretty mediocre at best. But maybe this is an opportunity to do something interesting.

Python environment is a clusterfuck. Which UV is rapidly bringing into something somewhat sane. Python isn’t the ultimate language. But I’d definitely be more interested in “replace yourself with a UV Python script” over “replace yourself with a shell script”. Would be nice to see use this as an opportunity to do better than Bash.

I realize this is unpopular. But unpopular doesn’t mean wrong.

> Python environment is a clusterfuck. Which UV is rapidly bringing into something somewhat sane.

Uv is able to do what it does mainly because of a) being a greenfield project b) in an environment of new standards that the community has been working on since the first days that people complained about said clusterfuck.

But that's assuming you actually need to set up an environment. People really underestimate what can be done easily with just the standard library. And when they do grab the most popular dependencies, they end up exercising a tiny fraction of that code.

> But I’d definitely be more interested in “replace yourself with a UV Python script” over “replace yourself with a shell script”.

There is no such thing as "a UV Python script". Uv doesn't create a new language. It doesn't even have a monopoly on what I guess you're referring to, i.e. the system it uses for specifying dependencies inline in a script. That comes from an ecosystem-wide standard, https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/. Pipx also implements creating environments for such code and running it, as do Hatch and PDM; and other tools offer appropriate support - e.g. editors may be able to syntax-highlight the declaration etc.

Regardless, what you describe is not at all opposed to what the author has in mind here. The term "shell script" is often used quite loosely.