Hacker News Reader

Comment by LambdaComplex | Hacker News Reader

1. Am I the only one who gets annoyed by the abundance of software being described as "beautiful" (or some other vague, subjective term)? And, honestly, Bash is probably the least "beautiful" "programming language" I can think of.

2. If you need this level of complexity, I feel like you should be reaching for Python or Go or something else that definitely isn't Bash

View on HN

For 1, I do agree that the term is overused, but in this case it's not really about the beauty of the code itself: it's about the fact that the final generated script acts in a predictable way and prints information and help messages in a format that people are already familiar with. You don't have to write your own usage message: it does it for you, and it looks the way I would expect a usage message to look.

I also see argument 2 a lot, and I've already addressed this in other comments, but sometimes you really just need to call a couple of commands while prepping some env vars or config files for convenience.

In those cases, reaching for Python or Go ends up being a lot of boilerplate for very little advantage, especially when you want to pass control over to other applications once you're done setting things up.

Re 1, the problem is that "beautiful" doesn’t tell you anything useful, other than (being uncharitable) the author having succumbed to tech marketing hype speech.

> 1. Am I the only one who gets annoyed by the...

No you aren't. This irritates me also. Bash is about as beautiful as perl.

> 2. If you need this level of complexity, I feel like you should be reaching for Python or Go or something else that definitely isn't Bash

This is true. Otherwise you risk [in bash] creating something very difficult to maintain for future contributors. The lengths people will go to avoid "programming" can be quite staggering.

My rant about “elegant” and “bash” in the same sentence:

https://ilya-sher.org/2021/03/19/running-elegant-bash-on-sim...

And then I have to learn Python or Go. Bash is ubiquitous and for the things I'm doing scripting for, something like this would be a pretty good use-case. Usually my scripts start out simple, but then become unwieldy monsters over time. I could use something like Bashly to refactor my monster Bash script to something more manageable.

One could make a Venn diagram of positive adjectives used frequently in Hacker News headlines and positive adjectives used frequently by a certain US ex-president.

"Beautiful" would be in the intersection. "Modern" is popular on HN, but not so much with the ex-president.

If this tool could actually create beautiful bash scripts, that would be quite an accomplishment!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com