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Tools: Code Is All You Need

(lucumr.pocoo.org)
313 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.459s | source
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forrestthewoods ◴[] No.44455498[source]
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.

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osigurdson ◴[] No.44455730[source]
Nobody likes coding in bash but everyone does it (a little) because it is everywhere.
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forrestthewoods ◴[] No.44455992[source]
> because it is everywhere

Except for the fact that actually it is not everywhere.

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nativeit ◴[] No.44456693[source]
I see your point, but bear with me here--it kind of is.

I suppose if one wanted to be pedantically literal, then you are indeed correct. In every other meaningful consideration, the parent comment is. Maybe not Bash specifically, but #!/bin/sh is broadly available on nearly every connected device on the planet, in some capacity. From the perspective of how we could automate nearly anything, you'd be hard-pressed to find something more universal than a shell script.

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forrestthewoods ◴[] No.44456885[source]
> you'd be hard-pressed to find something more universal than a shell script.

99.9% of my 20-year career has been spent on Windows. So bash scripts are entirely worthless and dead to me.

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1. pxc ◴[] No.44551836[source]
My first software internship in college, I was at a Microsoft shop. I ended up astonishing the people I worked with (who were all programmers) by automating solutions to some annoyances I ran into, some menial tasks I was assigned to do, etc. I did it all with Cygwin or MSYS, although I don't remember whether the scripts were Bash or Fish.

All of my co-workers could have written their own code to automate such tasks. They even had access to PowerShell, which was by then part of Windows.

But they didn't, because they didn't have a shell worth "living in" (PowerShell is much too slow-- and to a lesser extent, too verbose-- for daily interactive use), and writing code to automate the same tasks in a "real programming language" seemed laborious and boring enough that it always made sense to put it off and live with the mess.

Solid bash experience would benefit lots of Windows developers.