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Comment by uniformlyrandom | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I like this approach. Common "regular" Bash programs have a huge advantage - they are common. When I share my 'may accidentally conjure up a monster' one-liners with my team, I am sure they can read it, understand it, and run it. I lose that advantage with the use of a very nice, but obscure tool.

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Bash involves tons and tons of arcania. It also doesn't support features that PL editors have like Intellisense. I sometimes feel like the only people who don't see a problem with the Unix experience are people who've used it day-in day-out for a decade, and don't need to grep man pages more than they'd like to. But by then, it's Stockholm Syndrome? I think this Github project might begin to pull out the chord. I know my Python better than I know my awk/sed/bash/xargs/find/make/bc...

Bash has one major advantage though: it’s core libraries and and commands almost never change which mean your scripts are most likely going to work forever. Python core library development is filled with asshats who like to deprecate naming conventions in later versions rather than just improving the existing libraries and keeping the method names the same. Python is great for a lot of reasons but if you know bash well, it is far more reliable in the long term.

I'm 44 years old. When I read your comment, I think "Great, the Bash script will continue to work the next time I need it (which might be after Elon lands humans on another planet)". But when my 22 year old colleague reads it, he likely thinks "Great, that script is full of incomprehensible syntax from the era of my last diaper change".

Thinking long term is a skill that is often realized only after one fails to make a previous long-term investment.

> Python core library development is filled with asshats who like to deprecate naming conventions in later versions rather than just improving the existing libraries and keeping the method names the same.

I think this is a gross misrepresentation of both technologies, to the point that it goes well beyond a normal apples-to-oranges comparison.

A shell script runs well on any standard-compliant implementation, just like python3.4 scripts will run exactly like they always did when running on a python3.4 interpreter.

Python's libraries break when asshats "deprecate naming conventions" only when you somehow assume that, say, your python3.10 script would run on python2.7, or just like your shell script breaks when the program it calls happens to break it's cli.

Also, is versioning still a problem given the pervasiveness of package managers with support for version pinning?

Most of the examples would be relatively simple Perl or AWK one-liners. The appeal of this tool seems mostly to be that you can use Python, which isn't one-line friendly out of the box.

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