Hacker News Reader

Different tools serve different purposes. Just because you wouldn't write a web browser/server/IDE/OS in a shell scripting language doesn't mean they don't have value or are failed paradigms.

I've written tons of shell scripts for one-off jobs or simple work that would've taken 2, 3, maybe 4 times the amount the time to write in a "real" programming language. (E.g. throwaway code to generate 10,000 test files that are slightly different would take me 5-10 minutes in bash, but maybe half an hour in node or python.)

Passing around strings isn't the BEST paradigm but it's extremely flexible when you need flexibility. There are times when you need something more solid and that's fine too.

And fwiw I'd bet a majority of the software you listed uses bash somewhere in either their build process or SAAS stack.

On the projects I've hacked on, a lot of time has been spent trying to replace bash and autotools in the build process and reduce its usage. They are brittle and nobody really likes to maintain giant shell scripts filled with fragile regular expressions and other unreadable awk invocations. Plus I've lost count of the number of build scripts I've seen that do strange things like failing to handle spaces in paths because something is not escaped correctly. They are really not a good solution. This can be caught with CI, but if you use any kind of CI then you have even more incentive to get rid of it because bash and makefiles (which fork an additional shell on every command) are very slow.

Different tools serve different purposes, yes. However, some tools have much narrower uses than others. For instance, most developers agree that writing programs in assembly language is a very bad idea for about 99.9% of programs (1 out of 1000 - which is generous). And, from both empirical evidence, and reasoning from first principles (stringly-typed, quoting and escaping issues, lack of tooling, low performance, implementation-defined behaviors, poor ecosystem, try-to-continue instead of fail-quick design), we can see that shell is entirely unsuited for everything except interactive use.

Moreover, "time to write script" by itself is a bad metric, for several reasons: (1) the cost of understanding and maintaining the script is ignored (and obviously higher for bash than Python) (2) you're not including the higher likelihood of bugs in your bash programs (and all it takes is a single bug that requires 20 minutes to find and fix...) (3) if you had more experience with Python (or with specific libraries useful for writing shell-script-like things - this often goes overlooked) then your development time would probably be shorter and (4) the pool of Python devs is far greater than the pool of bash devs.

> Passing around strings...[is] extremely flexible when you need flexibility

This isn't accurate. Passing around typed data is just as flexible as strings - except that it adds a bunch of extra safety and type-checks. All data in "string" format, with the singular exception of actual English text that is being passed to an NLP system or something, is actually in a structured text format (the operations that you perform on which are merely isomorphic to existing operations on structured data)...that is very likely under-specified relative and more brittle than actual typed data. All that using a string representation does is make errors easier to make and harder to find.

> And fwiw I'd bet a majority of the software you listed uses bash somewhere in either their build process or SAAS stack.

Yes, because bash is a (bad) habit for tooling devs, not because it scales well or adds safety/performance/maintainability - as evidenced by the fact that there aren't any large pieces of software written in it.

That is - bash is used "somewhere" and not "everywhere" because you can only get away with it at small scales - at large scales, it just falls apart.

> Firefox, Linux, gcc, Visual Studio Code, Windows, Chrome, Google services, Discord, Spotify, Blender, GIMP, Apache, Slack, Office, Steam, Matrix/Element...almost every single non-trivial piece of software in existence is not composed out of Unix shell utility pipelines.

All true.

However, the development environment (and frequently the build systems) used for all of the above are likely substantially composed out of Unix shell utilities and pipelines, aided by very unix-y tools such as Perl or awk.

That says something, I think. Just not sure what.

Nice point. Pretty sure GP's observation, while correct, is wrong-headed, and something akin to saying, "Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, Chevrolet, Ford and even Tesla... every single non-trivial transportation vehicle in existence is not composed out of garage tools."

"Wrong-headed" is a dismissal, not a counter-argument. Do you have a specific point that you want to argue against?

Point is clearly made for all to see, but I will give it another attempt to help you understand. Your criticism of UNIX commands is not valid in the same way that it not a valid criticism of garage tools that major vehicle manufacturers do not build cars out of garage tools. My understanding is major applications aren't made using UNIX commands because they are ordinarily developed using programing language. So your observation, while incidentally true, as a criticism it is invalid, wrong-headed, misguided, or barking up the wrong tree, which ever way strikes you with the last amount of grief and personal discomfort. I believe your observation is, in fact, a straw man fallacy in the precise way it is fallacious if I observe as a criticism of UNIX tools that no major coffee manufacturers make their product with UNIX tools. While this is probably true, as an argument or criticism of UNIX tools it is simply not valid and not a cogent criticism.

> Point is clearly made for all to see

No, it is not. You said "wrong-headed" and then made a very vague analogy. Your point is the opposite of "clear" - in fact, it's unclear whether it exists at all.

> Your criticism of UNIX commands is not valid in the same way that it not a valid criticism of garage tools that major vehicle manufacturers do not build cars out of garage tools.

That's not a valid argument, either. That's a flawed, leaky, vague analogy that does nothing to actually describe, concretely, what your point is. To summarize: you made a non-argument, called it "clear", and then made the same non-argument again.

Here are my points, concretely: the fact that no major application has ever been built even mostly out of Unix shell very strongly indicates that it's unsuitable as a programming language, in addition to indicating its unpopularity. The fact that the most popular variants of Unix shell do not adhere well to the Unix philosophy also indicate that the Unix philosophy isn't a very good one for interactive use, either. The fact that all of the Unix shells (whether Unix-y or not) aren't used at all for building large applications also indicates that the Unix philosophy isn't suitable for building large programs.

> My understanding is major applications aren't made using UNIX commands because they are ordinarily developed using programing language.

The Unix shells are programming languages that implement the Unix philosophy. The fact that they aren't used to build any large or particularly useful piece of software means that the Unix philosophy itself isn't useful for those things.

> a straw man fallacy in the precise way it is fallacious if I observe as a criticism of UNIX tools that no major coffee manufacturers make their product with UNIX tools.

You used a lot of fancy words here to conceal the fact that your point is completely invalid. There's no relationship between coffee and Unix tools, but there's a very strong relationship between the Unix philosophy and the Unix tools. Therefore, the Unix tools not being used to make large and useful systems directly implies that the Unix philosophy is bad at the same.

Moreover, one of the selling points of the Unix tools is that you can use them as a programming language and compose them to make larger programs - so, the fact that people do not do that is, indeed, a valid and cogent criticism of them.

Very insightful. I've been thinking about this myself.

One of the possibilities is "just legacy code, bad habits, and bandwagoning", but that's a bit of a cop-out.

Another is "Unix utilities have a much better API to the filesystem and invoking other programs than most languages available today" - which is a (somewhat more-) concrete issue that we can address in other languages!

A third possibility is that the Unix tools transition very well from interactive use to batch use in a larger program - again, something that we can work on improving in other languages. Emacs seems to also do this - functions that are usable in both interactive mode (either invoking with M-x or through a keybinding) and as pieces in larger scripts/functions are pervasive. Breck Yunits calls these "user methods"[1] and I think that it's a good idea for a great pattern.

[1] https://breckyunits.com/user-methods.html

> use of text as an interchange format is such a heart-stoppingly bad idea ... consider a programming language where the only type is a string

Posix shell is a programming language where the only type is a string. Text as an interchange format works reasonably well in practice for a wide range of tasks.

To me shell, easy to combine unix commands and text as interchange is a clear example of New Jersey style from "Worse is better" [1] and their critique comes mostly from followers of MIT/Stanford style.

In my carrier I wrote hundreds of small shell scripts which use unix commands and text as an an interchange format. Yes, I see that some bugs can be prevented/detected by using something more strongly typed than shell, but all my scripts worked reliably enough and didn't suffer from any significant bugs so why bother? (disclaimer: I'm old fashioned and like to read man pages; I imagine shell can be full of traps if you ignore documentation and use only trail and error approach or practice stackoverflow driven development).

Of course for large projects and even some small ones other tools/languages fit better than shell but shell have its niche.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

> Posix shell is a programming language where the only type is a string.

You got it!

> Text as an interchange format works reasonably well in practice for a wide range of tasks.

Solutions using real programming languages score better on almost every conceivable metric (robustness, tooling, debuggability, maintainability, extensibility, performance, library ecosystem, developer pool, language pitfalls) other than initial time-to-develop, where they only win by a small margin (e.g. 10 minutes to develop a script instead of 2) - so, unless you're developing software purely for your own enjoyment, it's somewhat irresponsible to use shell instead of Python (or some other real, but script-amenable, programming language).

> To me shell, easy to combine unix commands and text as interchange is a clear example of New Jersey style from "Worse is better" [1] and their critique comes mostly from followers of MIT/Stanford style.

The New Jersey style is not only flawed on a theoretical level (just go look at any of those characteristics - tell me that it's more important for your bank or X-ray machine software, or your compiler or firewall to be simple than correct - and it's pretty clear that software that prioritizes simplicity above all else doesn't actually usefully serve humans, which is the point of software in the first place) but also unpopular on a practical level for actually building useful pieces of software.

The New Jersey style is a style guide that is only useful for making art projects (where the value is in beauty, not utility) that aren't required to be performant, maintainable, feature-complete, or have correct behavior.

> all my scripts worked reliably enough and didn't suffer from any significant bugs so why bother

Because of the above list of metrics that real languages score better than shell on - the only thing that shell wins on is initial time-to-development! It's going to be harder for others to maintain, debug, optimize, understand, and extend your scripts after you leave, harder to diagnose bugs, harder to find people who can write bash...

> shell have its niche

Yes - but it's an extremely narrow one where time-to-development is the most important metric and you're only working with small problems (as above a relatively low problem complexity, shell scripting is slower than using real languages anyway) - and these conditions are very rarely true at the same time (e.g. in infrastructure you might have a small problem, but correctness is far more important than TTS - while in a startup you want low TTS, but your problems are non-trivial).

I think the whole value of the Unix tool ecosystem is that you don't need to build large pieces of software. If you look at all the GUI tools that Microsoft had to build for Windows administration in the earlier days and how they eventually came out with PowerShell because of the inadequacy of those tools, you can see how successful Unix tools have been by the --lack-- of big software that does their job.

True, Linux is easier to automate. Though I still find Process Monitor's GUI more intuitive than trying to learn strace.

Windows automation did not require Powershell, we were doing all of that with VBScript and JScript before alongside Technet Resource Kit.

Also Powershell doesn't get much love from UNIX heads.

Git is probably the most notable example of a complex software program that is composed of a series of independant tools, though gcc is actually also architecturally a pipeline. Visual studio code might also not be a great example. It's an ide, whose ide features are based on seperate process servers which communicate over a textual protocol... it's very plan 9 esque.

Shell programming through small cli tools was never meant to scale into massive complex software so you're comparing apples and bananas.

Do one thing well and text as the universal interface works well in the small for parsing files, doing sys admin tasks, gluing a few things together. That's what it's intended for. It's obviously the wrong tool to build a system in. Used in the right context they compose beautifully.