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Comment by inferiorhuman | Hacker News Reader

  the ability to embed a shell command in backquotes and get its output easily

Aside from that being a gigantic footgun, you can do this in Ruby, PHP, and in POSIX shells but not in Javascript or Python.

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Never knew you can do it in Ruby too, thanks for sharing. I’ve missed that from python a lot.

So I firmly believe that using shell expansion in your scripts is a horrid idea no matter what the syntax. But while you're thinking about backticks and ruby:

Much like a modern POSIX shell you can also use the more ergonomic %x (e.g. %x{echo true} %x(echo false).

Backticks will perform string interpolation before execution just like a normal double quoted string.

Backticks are simply a method, so you can redefine that on any object.

Not sure why you think python can’t do this. I do it all the time.

How? I only know of subprocess.

Doubtful.

I'm reasonably sure you don't "embed a shell command in backquotes" all the time in Python (and I don't think this is pedantry; the specific ease of this syntax was the claimed benefit, not just the ability to shell out in some way).

Backticks were an alias of `repr` in Python 2.x:

    $ python2.7
    Python 2.7.6 (default, Nov 13 2018, 12:45:42) 
    [GCC 4.8.4] on linux2
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> foo="this is foo"
    >>> `foo`
    "'this is foo'"

And it went away in 3:

    $ python3
    Python 3.11.3 (main, Apr  5 2023, 15:52:25) [GCC 12.2.1 20230201] on linux
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> `ls`
      File "<stdin>", line 1
        `ls`
        ^
    SyntaxError: invalid syntax

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