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Comment by throwaway984393 | Hacker News Reader

For the past 3 years I've written almost all of my users' system tools in Bash v3. Nobody has yet reported a bug to me. Runs fine on Linux, Mac, and WSL, on every architecture. Single file, easy for anyone to read and edit, gets the job done. I don't even have to care that it's unpopular because there are no installation steps. Just 'bash foo.sh'. Sometimes that means they need to download some Go app that my script uses, but that's much better than me having to write and support all that other code.

If I have to do weird things with data structures or complex logic, I reach for Python, but I do it one of two ways: 1) so stupid that "python foo.py" works (no external deps), or 2) publish it to pypi so the user can just 'pip install foobar'.

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I've also been having bash as a strict req for tool language. As you say there are 1% or less cases where you can benefit from using smth else but that's 1%! My team had js as the main language and that's what we had that 1% in. Mostly no-deps scripts but where deps where needed we could hack around npx to install the deps on-demands. I would use deno today for that actually.

But! Almost nobody gets it. If you're into operations: "here we write our tool chain in Python". If you're into dev: "here we write our tool chain in js/go/php/etc/etc Bash would just be a +1"

+1??? You still need to write bash, or shell in general, for orchestration of build/ci/cd pipelines. If someone thinks that in 2021 they can escape learning shell, they are out of their minds. So no, it's not a +1.

Bash is the language that is not only available quite everywhere but it's also the one that allows you to write oneliner solutions https://twitter.com/andreineculau/status/1466107915450916867... and move on.

As devs we should spend 10x more on solid foundations that work as many of us, for as many years to come, than we do on hip-new-thingie-that-promises-to-fix-all-my-problems. It's as if we took the regex joke and our brains could only comprehend: I'm never using a regex. Keep it simple? Never.

I'm also a huge bash fan, and agree that distributing Python tools is a mess. But "Runs fine on Linux, Mac and WSL" is a stretch. Bash on Mac OS is a ball of shit unless you're installing a newer GNU bash via homebrew. Mac OS bash is just too old. I can't even remember the list of stuff that breaks because I stopped trying. If the target audience is mostly Mac users I'll just write zsh to begin with.

I ran into those problems too initially, but I've learned to avoid them. The version of Bash on Macs is version 3.2.57 iirc. This page has documentation of which features were introduced in v3, v4 (https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/bash2.html).

What I personally do is write POSIX shell, then add in things like arrays, $BASH_SOURCE, printf %q, and a few other handy features that have been around for a while. To test it, there is an official Docker image for Bash v3 (https://hub.docker.com/_/bash).

I love bash. It's probably my favourite language for productivity. I spent some time a while back trying to write a Lisp in bash, and have written a ~1kloc performance testing tool to get results while an entire team worked on a Haskell implementation.

I have a similar strategy but Bash... "easy for anyone to read and edit"?

Heck no. Bash is a terrible language by modern standards, with obscure syntax, many weird quirks, no type checking, no return values... How could developers program in Bash before Shellcheck!?

I think that internally, I draw the line at around 100 lines. Even refactoring a program shorter than that it's not a pleasant experience (not difficult, but requires a great deal of attention, when compared to any modern language).

I wouldn't call Bash a "language" per se... Bash is a user interface, first and foremost. Bash "scripting" is literally just the running of Bash shell commands in bulk. But every language does have people making the same complaints. Every language has quirks. Every language has obscure syntax (if you haven't found it yet, you just haven't used it enough...). Every language has people say either "There's no type checking!", or "It forces type checking!". And there are absolutely return values, they're just either integers or raw data on standard output. But the point is, it's not supposed to be a "good programming language". It just has to be more useful than manually typing in shell commands one at a time.

You're right about them needing to be short. Ideally every program should be short. But scripts are especially supposed to be short, because they're never supposed to get complex (or be fast/efficient); that's when you need a "real" program. Even the bottom of the Bash man page says about itself: "BUGS: It's too big and too slow."

(fwiw, back in the day we didn't use linters, we just had to write it all correctly the first time. punch card typos are a memorable lesson in checking your work)

It's technically a glue language, and can be considered a language due to the constructs it provides (e.g. arrays and hash maps).

The fact that every language has a variable amount of a certain property doesn't mean that the amount is the same for all the languages. The amount of domain knowledge required for simple programs is considerably higher in Bash, than any related language; even iterating the lines of a string can be unintuitive to casual users.

Bash is weakly typed, and weak typing is considerably unsafe (bug-prone) than any other related language (e.g. Python, which is has taken has share of shell scripting in modern operating systems).

Returning values via stdout is a workaround. If other parts of the function send messages to stdout, one needs to use a combination of redirects, which the vast majority of the programmers don't know. Calling the ability to return a value from 0 to 255 support for return value is a big stretch.

I think that Bash is a necessity, and I frequently use it (and it's fun-ish for small scripts), but it definitely doesn't fit the definition of "easy", being considerably more error-prone and unintuitive to any comparable language, possibly even when compare to Perl.

Perl and Bash are only "error-prone and unintuitive" in the way that woodworking is. If you have no education into how it all works, and you just take a saw or drill to a bunch of wood and try to hack together a table, the result will be terrible. You need to read something that explains how it works, then practice it and make some mistakes to learn from. The same thing is true of C, C++, Lisp, Haskell, all sorts of languages. Nobody just uses them perfectly on the first try.

Not all platforms have bash by default.

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